Or Give Me Death (3 page)

She was predicting things now. Was that all part of it? I took her hand. "Mama, Pa can never be governor. He's a colonial. And accused of treason, remember?"

She patted my hand. "He was governor six times. Now I'm tired. I think I'll retire. Will you see to the children?"

I did not look at MyJohn. But I knew the pain that would be written on his face. I said yes, I would see to the children.

"Y
OUR MA HAS
the sight," Pegg told me that night. "The Lord is restorin' to her for what the locust hath eaten."

How like Pegg to say something like that. The Negroes believed in things like second sight and uncommon powers. We paid no mind to their nonsense.

We were in the little clapboard house next to the mansion house, where Pa did his law work when he was home. Where MyJohn went to keep the books. Upstairs there were two bedrooms for any law clerks Pa might bring with him. I had Pegg put fresh sheets on the beds and I swept the place out. I neatened Pa's desk and put fresh ink in the botde. I sharpened his quill pens.

"She sees nothing," I shot back. "She's just raving."

"Mark her words," Pegg pushed. "The addled have the sight sometimes. Who are we to say who is sane and who isn't?"

I locked up Pa's office.

"You want I should get the cold meat and leftover biscuits an' fix things in the traveler's room?" she asked.

I said no. I wanted to do that for Pa myself. I sent her to the quarters for the night, then fetched the food and brought it inside where I set it on the hunter's sideboard and covered it with napkins. Then I lighted a fire.

Everything would be perfect for Pa. The traveler's room had a brick floor and its own entrance. Pa used it for travelers who came to see him. The brick floor wouldn't be ruined by their muddy boots. I got fruit and Madeira wine ready, too. Pa's tastes were simple.

I lighted candles and set them in the windows. The nights were still chilled. Here in Hanover County many was the time we'd had hailstorms in May, ruining the orchards and crops.

Ma was asleep. Edward was in his cradle in my room. When the fire had warmed the traveler's room, I brought his cradle in, so Pa could see him. Thank heaven he'd started sleeping through the night of late.

I wrapped myself in an old quilt and put a branch candlestick on the table beside me. It was pewter, not silver. Pa's fondness for plainness spilled over to the household furnishings. We still had animal skins on the floors, not Persian carpets, even though ours was one of the biggest houses in the county.

Pa seemed fearful of ostentation. It harkened back to his youth.

When he was a boy, he spent a lot of time with his uncle Langloo Winston, his mother's brother, who'd lived half the time in far-flung wilderness cabins, traded with Indians, and was said to have Indian wives. Great Uncle Langloo never came near polite society in the Tidewater.

Pa's people are all Winstons and Dabneys, educators, writers, military officers. Pa was born knowing he came from eminence, but if he wanted to rise in the world, he had to do it on his own because everything his mother had went to his older half brother, John Syme, Jr., from his mother's first marriage. And his own pa gambles and is a poor manager.

Pa and his brother William had kept a poor-man store and gone bankrupt. Then he married Mama, with me already on the way, and worked in her father's tavern and worked his own fields with the Negroes.

I think, even though he's a famous lawyer now, he's no more than two whoops and a holler from being a backwoodsman himself.

When he first started lawyering, he used to hunt deer, pheasant, and partridge along the way to Louisa Courthouse. He'd be wearing his leather breeches. His coat would be stained with blood from the hunt. He'd go into the courthouse to take up a case with a brace of ducks in his hands and his saddlebags on his arms.

I think that's why Anne is the little savage she is, that she takes after Uncle Langloo.

Well, I was doing my best with Anne. I settled in the chair, thinking it was time I started her on the loom. For three years now we've been planting flaxseed, and Pa got us a loom and flax sickle, and we wear homespun.

I miss my silk, but I still have six yards of crimson laid by. I wondered if Pa would mind if I sewed up a gown of it. As Patrick Henry's daughter, would that be unpatriotic? MyJohn so likes me in silk. I wondered if I should bother telling Pa? I could wear it after we were wed, when we had parries. A girl had a right to silk in her dowry chest, didn't she? Still, I mustn't let Anne see me working on it. She'd tell.

I picked up the tea towels from my dowry chest that I'd brought to work on. Outside there was a near-full moon. When it came on to being full, Anne would be outside at Chiswell's grave, waiting to see his ghost. She was good for her promises.

An owl somewhere in a tree was asking who. At my feet was Pa's best hunting dog, Charger, who was getting long in the tooth and spent nights near the fire.

What would it be like, I wondered, to be married? To nevermore have to say good-bye to MyJohn? To have him with me always?

Why did Pa, who was so ahead of everybody else in his thinking, have such set ideas about a wife's place in the scheme of things? Maybe that's why Mama was going mad. He believed a woman should never try to control her husband by opposition, displeasure, or anger.

Mama hadn't. I never recollect her trying to oppose him. When they wed in the front parlor of her father's house at Rural Plains, she'd promised to obey him "even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord."

I could not be that kind of wife. Nor would MyJohn want me to be.

If Pa had only made more allowances for her. If only he'd shown the same compassion as he had for criminals in the Court of Oyer and Terminer in Williamsburg. And what about the time he rode fifty miles to defend a Baptist minister imprisoned in Spotsylvania County jail? He'd charged into the courtroom. "Great God!" he'd yelled. "Did I hear what those men are charged with? What? Preaching the gospel of the Son of God? Did I hear that?"

The case was dropped.

Would he yell "Great God!" when he heard about Mama?

Pa was not mean to her. He never struck her, never even raised his voice. I know he loves her. But he's become so much of a
personage
now. Arguing all those cases, presenting all those resolutions.

"Your passions are no longer your own when he addresses them," George Mason, a friend of George Washington, had said of Pa after hearing him speechify.

Nor is your reason, I thought.

I worked on my tea towels until Charger thumped his tail, got up, and went, whining, to the door. Pa was home.

***

H
E CAME IN
quietly. His blue eyes took in the room, the cradle, me. I knew he was looking for Mama.

"Patsy," he said. And in one fluid movement he patted Charger's head, dropped his saddlebags, set his cloak aside, and reached out to me.

"Pa, I'm glad you're home." I tried not to let my voice break. I needed to be strong. He disliked weakness.

He hugged me fiercely, and I felt as if
I'd
come home, not him.

His face was rough with a day's growth of beard. He smelled of tobacco and horse.

"Sit, Pa, I've got food. Sit by the fire. Is the wind picking up?"

He sat, but not before leaning down to touch little Edward's face. The baby stirred and in his sleep made a suckling motion with his mouth. "He's grown," Pa said.

"Yes. He's thriving." I fixed a plate of meat and biscuits, butter, cheese, and pickled preserves. I served a glass of Madeira.

"Ah, Patsy, you spoil me." He sat, setting his tricorn hat down. Again the piercing blue eyes under his bushy brows took in the room. "Where's your mother?"

"In bed."

He ate. But he was interested in food only for the nourishment it gave his body. He'd as soon eat coon as ham or turkey.

"Did you bring any clerks with you?" I asked.

"No. I'll be off to Chesterfield County in two days."

"Oh, Pa!" I wailed, but his look stopped me. The sudden scowl, the strong mouth gone grim, the firm chin and high forehead and long nose. That face had stopped better people than me, I told myself.

It had stopped Parliament and the Stamp Act, hadn't it?

"Another Baptist preacher in trouble," he said. "The minister of the parish ruined the preacher's Bible with the butt end of his riding whip, then shoved the whip into the preacher's mouth. Then the clerk of the court roped him to his horse and dragged him to the sheriff, who gave him twenty lashes. We can't have such persecution, Patsy."

"Are you the only one to come to their defense?"

"I've become their Robin Hood, it seems." He shook his head. "How can we have a prosperous land if we don't encourage religious toleration?"

He'd be speechifying soon, if I didn't stop him.

"Pa," I said, "Mama is ill."

He gulped down his Madeira. "What do you mean, 'ill'? Ague? Fever? What?"

"Her mind, Pa," I said gently. "Her mind goes. This morning she had a spell."

"'A spell'?"

"She tried to drown Edward."

He put aside his plate and glass. The fire spit. I waited. He got up and went again to kneel beside the cradle to touch the baby's head. "Is he all right?"

"Yes."

"God save us." He stood and looked at me. "So you know."

"What?" I asked.

"What think you, Patsy? She is my wife. I've known for a while now."

"That she wanted to kill Edward?"

"That she was sad and weeping all the time. But I thought it was just what sometimes comes after a birth. Not this." He gestured to the cradle. "Are the other children all right?"

"Right as rain, Pa. But Anne saw it."

He shook his head.

"Why didn't you say something to me, Pa?"

"I wanted to, but betimes I thought I was wrong. I prayed I was wrong." He came over to me, put his hand on my head. "I've been a coward," he said.

I looked up at him. "You, a 'coward'? You who spoke treason against the king?"

He turned away. "This is a new turn, this business about harming the baby." His shoulders slumped. "Though I had no idea she had come to such a dolorous state, I've already taken some steps."

"What 'steps'?" My heart pounded.

"I've spoken to Dr. Pasteur and Dr. Gait in town. They recommend Dr. Hinde. He's coming to see her tomorrow." He sat down. He did not look at me. "Pasteur and Gait spoke of a place in Williamsburg, if she got any worse." He stared into the fire.

"Pa!"

"What else?" His voice grew strong in the way that robbed you of your passions and your reason.

"It's a terrible place," I whispered. "MyJohn told me about it. He offered to take me to see it."

"She'd be kept away from the vagrants. But yes, you go with MyJohn to see it. Mr. Pelham, the jail keeper, said his wife, Mary, would personally see to her."

"The jail keeper," I said dully.

"Would you have the little ones see her worsen?"

Silence, deep and swirling, like the New Found River after it rained hard. Then he spoke. "It's all we have until the hospital is finished in Williamsburg, for those with ailments of the mind. The House of Burgesses has approved Mr. Pelham's accommodations."

No sense in arguing. Not with a man who charges into court and gets cases dropped.

"MyJohn and I will go tomorrow," I said. "We'll stay with Mrs. Barrow, Clementina Rind's sister, on the road,
then Clementina can put me up one night while we are there. Is that all right with you?"

"Better than camping in the woods," he said dourly. He camped out on the two-day ride to Williamsburg when the weather permitted.

"When do you leave?"

"When you get back will be all right."

"Pegg says we should get a wet nurse for Edward. She reminded me that Delia is about to give birth."

"That might be a good idea. Would you see to it?"

I kissed him. "Yes," I said.

Nobody knows him like I do, I thought. He is so forceful and powerful in court, because there he meets the enemy, injustice, and can overcome it. But here at home he cannot name the enemy. It is not in any resolves or writs or law books.

It wasn't until I'd climbed into bed that I remembered that I'd not asked him about my wedding.

A
LWAYS
I
'D GONE
with Mama to Williamsburg. To Margaret Hunter's Shoppe, on Duke of Gloucester Street, where I'd gotten my new riding habit.

Before we'd stopped importing English goods, that is.

We'd have tea and cakes in the bake shop of the Raleigh Tavern.

When we still drank tea.

Or, better, visit Clementina Rind at the
Gazette
office. Her coffee and gingerbread were much more enticing.

Clementina was a special friend to our family. Although I found her rather pushy for a female. But, I supposed, if you helped your husband run the newspaper, you had to be pushy.

Many a harried housewife or romantic maid betook of her coffee and gingerbread and hospitality. It wasn't only that she wrote stories, as well as women's news, recipes, gossip, and notices. She encouraged budding poets and gave advice: from the latest news of proper mourning clothes to when the Hampton post rider would arrive from Yorktown to Williamsburg (Tuesdays and Saturdays).

MyJohn was wise enough to know I needed a woman friend to talk to, pushy or not, and dropped me off.

"Patsy Henry, how good to see you." She came to the front room herself to greet me, wiping ink-stained hands on her apron. "I've got your room all ready."

I sank down by the large multipaned window that was hung with prints from England showing the latest fashions.

In the background hovered William and John, six and eight, and Maria, her small daughter. Her older boys, Charles and James, helped in the shop. And the Rinds supported an older relative, John Pinkney; an apprentice, Isaac Collins; and a Negro named Dick.

"I have that magazine your mama asked for last time she was in."

"Mama's not well," I said.

She nodded knowingly. "Come to the back. I have coffee and gingerbread."