Boris and Sharkey head West

         

The General, the Martyr, and the Merchant’s Daughter

An Excerpt

The year is 1703. Angelique has been kidnapped by pirates—sorry, privateers, while on her way to New France (AKA Canada)



Chapter Three





Boris And Sharkey Head West

Angelique could see her future. She was resigned to an unpleasant visit among the citizens of Boston. How could it be otherwise than unpleasant, Bostonians spoke English. There would be no one to discuss the interesting topics of the day, no one to share the little secrets, the flirtations, the little frissons which life afforded; a cold, drab, passionless existence was all she could foresee.



As Captain  Aspenwall’s hostage, she was locked in a tiny room far below the waterline of the Millie Perkins; They call it a cabin; but it was no more than a cell, really. In fact, Angelique was certain there were actual prison cells that were more spacious. A candle stub meant she could have read, if there had been any books in her language, but there weren’t; so she devoted her time to observing the family of rats who shared her living space.  The antics of the children were entertaining, and she gave them all names. They ate anything, though, and she decided it was better that she had no books, less they develop bad habits.



On fine days she was allowed the deck, between the fore and main sails. The air was a blessing, but all the while she had to endure the suggestive and not entirely original comments from those employed aloft. English to their toes, of course, but they had picked up the requisite phrases in foreign ports. Probably they had only the vaguest notions of what they were saying, so she forgave them, every one.

         Captain Aspenwall believed that a tight ship was a happy ship and strove to enforce discipline with a firm but even hand. Angelique was confident she could walk the deck in safety, partly because Aspenwall seemed like an honorable man, for an Englishman, and also because he tended to regard her as a fragile and highly valuable possession. Angelique was of two minds about this. Being a hostage might be diverting; she felt she had become an object of curiosity and desire; certainly she rarely dined alone, yet the experience began to pale rather quickly; all that time locked in a tiny compartment with a rat family that now expected to be fed with alarming frequency was quite enough to put the whole subject of sea-roving in a bad light. Even worse would be her confinement in Boston, where, she was sure, there would be no promenades to take the sea air, and no crusty tars with their colorful smattering of entertaining but very obscene French.



They hardly ever saw other ships, and those they did, Aspenwall seemed eager to avoid, though the Millie Perkins was well armed, armed for nearly any contingency, quite capable of throwing a twenty pound shot half a mile, if the occasion demanded. Aspenwall had shipped any number of ex-marines to man the tops, and there were cutlasses, grenados, battle-axes galore, but he was a cautious man, and tried to choose his prey rather more carefully than your bona fide pirate might. The whole enterprise, which in Dover had seemed to present all the advantages of owning a mint, had taken on the characteristics of a pleasure cruise, with all the expense and bother, and little of the pleasures. The cruise was a failure, with only one slightly addled French girl to show for it. Had her family been rich as Midas, their resources would hardly be sufficient to support one hundred and twenty men at sea for a year. Aspenwall was going broke.

         So he shaped a course not for Boston proper, but for a smallish town to the north, Marblehead by name, where the people took most of their living from the sea. Those that did not worked in taverns, or were lawyers.

While Aspenwall was careful to distinguish himself from those of the piratical profession, the lawyers he encountered had no such qualms. Aspenwall sailed away without the French hostage, but a new appreciation of the word ‘bloodsucker.’ Angelique and her potential ransom had been turned into cash, not a lot of cash, certainly not a fair amount, given the potential gains the hostage embodied, but enough for provisions to get back to England.

The lawyer, a widower whose name was Fleece, possessed a smattering of French, not, naturally, the same French employed by the salty tars, but French that enabled her to understand that she must feed the dogs, beat the carpets, and quiet the children. To be sure she understood completely, he took her by the wrist and guided her hand to his sex. This left Angelique with one free hand, though, and when he had retrieved his glasses he went silently back to his office, leaving her with the hungry dogs, the dusty carpets, and some sticky, disorderly children.

It turned out that the children, in order to be quieted, needed to be fed, just like the dogs. Angelique frequently marched down the hill to the commercial quarter, where the street was lined with shops selling bread, meat pudding, and wooden ducks. There were also shops selling beer, wine, and gin, with names like Binnacle, Barnacle, and Mostly George, but usually the dogs had just rolled in something and Angelique would have to hasten back up the hill without a visit to the watering-places of Marblehead, which were already taking on a reputation one might term legendary. This was unfortunate, for stationed behind the bar in one of the foremost of the famous watering places, dispensing wines, spirits and sage political advice, was handsome young Eldridge Gerry, future congressman and inventor of that form of election-rigging known as Gerrymandering. But they never met.

Angelique had a room of her own, a small room of course, but with actual curtains, at the top of the house, which was at the top of the hill overlooking the harbor. The town, with its quaint lanes, its glimpses of the sea, and its famous watering-places was pleasant enough, the citizens still possessed enough natural curiosity to find a Frenchwoman intriguing, and she was reckoned a competent dog feeder and carpet beater. The jury was still out on the children. Still, two out of three, and there was not a lobsterman or clam digger who would not have happily scooched over to offer her a seat in the Barnacle or even Mostly George.

Angelique was in a cage, though, and she knew it. Lawyer Fleece’s ransom note was not aboard the mail packet before she was scanning the harbor for something afloat that might take her away. She knew this ransom business could take months, and the local Presbyterian minister was eager to claim her as a convert. Not speaking French though, there was little he could do beyond holding up a crucifix —holding the demon-image with ice-tongs so as not contaminate his flesh— and shaking his head.

And when William Bolt, a servant indentured to one Hieronymus Rood, horse dealer, of Rowley, Massachusetts, delivered the matched pair of chestnuts to the domicile of Lawyer Fleece, he noticed the smallish form out by the pear tree, beating a carpet with one hand and comforting a squalling child with the other, and he quickly developed, as he strolled across the yard, several very nearly believable reasons why his presence in and about the stable, the stable yard, and even the very house itself, would be required for the foreseeable future. His reasoning was so cogent, the child so distracting, the horses so spirited, Angelique would have agreed to any proposal, and William was given leave to come and go at will. Lawyer Fleece was often away at Boston, standing drinks for senators and lumber barons, so William and Angelique were left, with the exception of the dogs and children, plus Boris and Sharkey the horses, pretty much alone to see where a shared interest in the pursuit of happiness might lead.



Hieronymus Rood had agreed to pay William’s passage to America. In return, William had agreed to work off the cost of his ticket by toiling in the vineyards of horsehusbandry until his debt was clear. Rood, however, was a horse trader, adept at the manipulation of values, and the time needed for William to pay what he owed was extended every time Rood thought about it, until it stretched ahead for decades. After a few months, though, William began to chaff under the restraint imposed by his benefactor. Locked in the stable each night so he might not indulge in alcohol, church three times a week, poor food, small money, and the very definite sense that he was not, most assuredly not, his own man, soon added up to a servant who wondered unceasingly what lay beyond the horizon. So the little wounds William suffered each day had begun to work and fester even before William clapped eyes on Angelique, and instead of cooling and soothing, the way the sight of an attractive woman might be expected to do, the knowledge of Angelique’s existence; the fact that she was right here, not twenty miles from where he was struggling to work off his passage, added heat to the abrasions of servitude, and William began to think about running.

  Because freedom was in the air, all around, in the careless coming and going of people in the streets, in the motion of trees, and in the eyes of the Indians, who disappeared like smoke as soon as you thought you knew where they were. So William was intensely conscious of the lack of freedom in his own existence. Stifled impulses, thwarted desires, and ruined dreams were his lot, as long as he stayed with Hieronymus Rood.  He knew he was meant to find freedom and possess it, but it seemed to exist on another plane, certainly not in those places where English towns had taken root, where men had gathered to get on with the serious business of making money and instilling the servants with proper values. Freedom was close by, but had to be gotten to.



William wasn’t sure what aggravated him more, the fact that Angelique existed at all, or that she shared this septic atmosphere of repressed impulses and thwarted desires. But privately though, those impulses and desires were not entirely thwarted, being to an extent mutually acknowledged and indulged in, the real and present desire and impulse being stronger than the guilt, remorse, and probable retribution  —at least for long enough for the impulse and desire to be assuaged, however temporarily. —While gazing down from the hayloft, Lawyer Fleece’s new and much varnished brougham began to look more and more capable of that long arduous journey to freedom. This high-wheeled and somewhat ostentatious vehicle had been purchased that it might convey Lawyer Fleece to the state house on the occasion of his being elected to the legislature, a thing highly probable, if you listened to Elbridge Gerry, but there being no election for months to come, the brougham was carefully polished, but kept under wraps.

One night though, with the dogs and children asleep and Lawyer Fleece away in Boston, Will brought the matched pair from their stalls and hitched them to the shiny and somewhat impractical carriage; Boris and Sharkey, stepping high, were curious and alert at being taken out in the dark of night, and innocently unaware that they were being stolen, horse napped, accomplices in Breach of Contract, aiding and abetting, participating in a crime against property, to wit: trap stealing. They might have been helping to compromise the very Foundations of Society, but they were happy to be out of those stalls.

While taking leave of an indenture, not to mention hostage situation, was indeed an offence against property, punishable by major corporal discomfort all along the Atlantic seaboard, horse stealing was a crime of entirely different caliber; calling for tongue boring with the red hot iron, ear removal or even, for repeated offences, neck stretching.

When Nature calls, though, she will not be denied, and Will, gazing at Angelique as she chucked her belongings into the brougham, was fully confident that the risks, hot iron, tongue boring and all, were fully worth the prize. They set off, rolling south to pick up the road west at Cambridge, Boris and Sharkey a little excited at first, and inclined to shy at any excuse, but Will kept them firmly in hand as they churned along the fields, past the swamps and woods,  empty stableyards and the farthest pastures, past the smoky charcoal burners and the silent nighttime forges, away, out, past, giddy with hope and uncertainty. Because the whole frivolous and illegal enterprise rested on the shaky foundation of a mutual sexual attraction. And both of them were intensely, if privately, aware of the notoriously unstable nature of this type of partnership, but hoping for the best.

William, being the instigator and general architect of this illegal and possibly treasonous —Angelique being a citizen of a hostile nation— undertaking, grew more and more aware, as daylight approached, of the dire consequences (if caught) of horse thieving and trap napping. He grew uneasy on a number of counts. One, he was too obviously not of a station in life to own such a wonderful lively pair, not to mention the brougham, with its polished wood and pig skin upholstery, hence, anyone willing to take the time to notice would conclude he had stolen them. Two; the farther they traveled from the coastal towns, and the arm of the law, the closer they grew to Canada, and Bill was not unaware of Angelique’s antecedents, knowing full well that the draw of familial ties, however constraining they may have appeared when close at hand, might induce the spirited young woman at his side to cross forbidding mountains and ford unfordable streams in her desire to be among those of her own blood, not to mention just people who could express thoughts in her language other than those related to the obscenely flirtatious.



Angelique considered everything carefully. She considered herself not as a citizen of New France, because she had never set foot there. Her father was there, and, she presumed, other people with whom she might converse. Angelique considered herself French; now, through no fault of her own, she found herself among the English. The smooth talking horse handler from Rowley was English, but there seemed to be certain spark there, a glimmer of interest, which, along with the Englishness and those horses, might prove useful. Geography was not one of Angelique’s strong suits, but she knew enough to realize that a journey overland to Quebec was not to be undertaken lightly. Lacking a French ship in the harbor, a horse jockey might be just the one to guide her across those ranges and rivers she somehow knew separated her from her countrymen.

Angelique had not been much impressed with William at first. In time, though, his finer qualities had begun to shine through the lame sallies, the obvious lies, and the horrible accent.

Although not much given to self-examination, she found a spark of her own to contend with. Any feeling of warmth or congeniality toward one of those dirty blasphemous protestant Englishmen had to be firmly constrained. Though she kept in her heart the memory of the kind young priest, with his pale cheeks and flashing eyes, he was, after all a priest,

Despite their differences in national origin, language, the fact that William had no understanding of wine and Angelique considered oatmeal a food for draft animals,

She had begun looking  forward to William’s visits, and his repeated entreaties to help him look for his watch in the hayloft could not be denied for very long.

But, as they began to roll west, Angelique was still not sure. She felt most of her options were still open, and circumstance would determine her course. If a way to Canada presented itself, good riddance to the English. On the other hand, if one had to strike out into the wilderness, William was not the worst companion imaginable. Fate would deal the next card.



There was much for both of them to consider and to avoid considering, as they rolled through the long pre-dawn hours. The night was endless. The weary horses grew dull and stupid.  Finally William could see through the trees. They rumbled over a bridge, and the water beneath was white and swift. The sound loosened something, and she laid a hand on Will’s thigh.

“Should we not stop and hide?”

She had no more than spoken the words when the trees opened and a great white house appeared, set back from the road. At this the horses perked up their ears, their knees began to churn once more, and they turned in, almost of their own accord.

The owners of the house, Mr. and Mrs. Grace, were happy for the company, and invited them in for breakfast, hoping, perhaps, for a bit of scandal to relish their eggs. Mr. Grace, a large, white-haired, square-jawed florid man, concerned himself with eating and listening while his wife quizzed them relentlessly on their origin, destination, purpose, and relations. The fugitives consumed a dozen eggs between them as they fended off questions that very nearly approached the invasive, and were on their second cup when Mr. Grace’s absence was noted, along with sound of galloping hooves receding in the distance.

“He’s just gone to wake the Slob,” explained Mrs. Grace. She laughed nervously, and alone. “A good worker, but a late riser.”  The hired hand, a young man from Slobovia, lived just down the road, but both William and Angelique noticed, with that alertness engendered by the possibility of flogging, that she gestured, unconsciously, in the opposite direction.

“Have some pie,” said Mrs. Grace, with a tremor in her voice that might have been fear, had she not been consumed with thoughts of a reward, “It’s peach.” 

“Perhaps a small piece.”  William beginning to recover from the shock of finding himself where he was.

“Then we must be away,” Angelique insisted, “we have far to go.”

“And where might that be?” asked Mrs. Grace in all innocence.

“Why, Deerfield,” said Will, in a burst of impatience, “I thought we told you that.”

“Could have sworn you said Hadley.”

“No, no,” said Angelique, “Truly, we must go.”  And she tugged his sleeve. A small tug, but enough to wake William from his enchantment, and he sprang to his feet.

“By all means. We don’t wish to be one the road at night.”

“But,” Mrs. Grace pointed out, “it’s but ten hours to Deerfield, and surely you were on the road last night.”  And she did wave the pie, so that its aroma might entice.

But William and Angelique were making for the door, flat-footed and disjointed, not wishing to offend, but not wishing to be caught at breakfast by the sheriff’s men, either. “What do we owe?” asked Will.

“Oh no,” Mrs. Grace was also unwilling to tear the membrane of hospitality, “Go on with you.”

And so they did, out the door and down the steps, except William missed the bottom tread, staggered and went down, even as the thunder of hooves on the bridge announced the arrival of the sheriff’s men.

Angelique, though new to this horse thieving business, saddled also with the added handicap of a bourgeoise upbringing, was blessed, nonetheless, with  a hard-nosed and practical approach to life, and had the horse lines off the railing in a blink. The horses, with that wonderful telepathy of domestic animals everywhere, sensed her urgency and were wheeling toward the road even as William rolled in the dust and the sheriff’s gang appeared around the bend.

Angelique had the reins in one hand and the whip in the other. The practical French peasant, threaten by a group of concerned citizens, would have made a dash for freedom, but Angelique hauled back on the reins just as Boris and Sharkey were about to plunge for the open highway. The horses reared in confusion as William scrambled aboard. Then Angelique gave the horses their heads, The chaise shot down the drive and slewed onto the road with gravel flying, as the sheriff came pounding up on a gigantic bay, his arm raised in the peremptory gesture that has signaled “stop” through all ages and cultures,

It was a near thing for a while, but Angelique had the hands of a born driver. The horses knew that all depended on them and soon the concerned citizens recalled other concerns and fell back. William occupied himself with holding on and cursing Farmer Grace, his works, his wife and his children, if God had been so unkind as to allow any into the world, Angelique getting a short course in colloquial American invective along the way. That bastard had double-crossed them, turned them in at the mere hint of a possible reward, and deserved to be dipped in shit and rolled in sawdust. Will adhered to the values he was raised with, where an offer of hospitality meant not summoning the sheriff if it turned out you guest might have some difficulty with the law. Angelique only shrugged. The Graces were, after all, English.