Annapolis, page 4
She checked into a bed-and-breakfast on Prince George Street, a block from the Naval Academy and a block from Saint John’s, a liberal arts college with a Great Books curriculum. Nowhere in America could you find two more unlikely neighbors “linked by the imperfect logic” of geography. Susan was beginning to think that with the Staffords, she would encounter many pairs of opposites linked imperfectly yet inextricably. And that was what would make things interesting.
The innkeeper was a friendly young man of thirty or so who padded about the house in his stocking feet and took great pains to make her feel at home. He showed her to her room, told her about the good restaurants, and gave her an envelope, which contained manuscript pages and a note from Jack Stafford: “Twenty-four hours from meeting me. Bet you can’t contain yourself. I enclose the second chapter of The Stafford Story. Read about Black Jed, his brother, Big Tom, their nemesis Rebecca Parrish, and the big house they built in Annapolis. See you tomorrow. Have intelligent questions.”
Egotistical asshole.
At least the next chapter made good reading while she ate alone at Café Normandie.
The Stafford Story
Book Two
Staffords and Parrishes, Rebellion and Revenge
October 1774
Jedediah Stafford had made many a voyage to Annapolis, but few had been as joyous as the one he made on that crisp autumn day.
He had put sixty-eight summers behind him by then. The effort to haul his girth around grew greater by the month, and the loneliness of his widowhood never abated. But a grandson had been born to the old master of Stafford Hall. And that was enough to have him gazing hopefully toward a future he doubted he would see, in a world where the natural order of things could no longer be predicted.
For all his life, that order had been tobacco for tea, American raw material for English manufacture. And his sons had learned it well.
Black Jed took tobacco consignments, shipped them in Stafford vessels, and brought English goods back to sell. Big Tom built the vessels that did the carrying—topsail schooners with arrogantly raked masts and hulls that cut scythelike through the great fields of water between England and America.
After a decade of tax disputes and a century of British control over where Colonials could sell and what they could buy, Stafford Brothers still prospered. That was what made their challenge to the natural order of things so hard for their father to understand.
But Jedediah put his worries away because he was sailing to a christening, and Nervous Duncan Parrish was sailing with him. They stood together at the starboard rail of Big Tom’s flagship, the Hannah S., two old friends in tricornes and brown traveling coats, talking and feeling the timeless roll of the Chesapeake.
Success as a Patuxent planter had made Nervous Duncan less nervous, but even at seventy-eight, he twitched when he talked, tittered when he laughed, and spoke in a high-pitched whine that grew louder as his hearing grew weaker. None of this bothered Jedediah, however, nor did Duncan’s daughter, who stood alone on the larboard side, where the shadow of the sail kept the sun from her pallid skin.
Rebecca Parrish was not unpleasing to the eye, but most tidewater bachelors said there was no dowry large enough to dull her sharp tongue. When the ship went on the tack, she followed the shade of the sail to the starboard side and said to Jedediah, “Did you know that my father breaks a vow by going to this christening?”
“How so?”
“He vowed he would not visit our Annapolis house till the Annapolis Resolves were lifted. Didn’t you, Father?”
“It don’t make much sense for us to withhold payment on honest debts to London creditors just because the British close the port of Boston,” said Nervous Duncan.
“It serves Boston right for all the trouble they caused,” agreed Jedediah, “yappin’ like scalded dogs every time our taxes went up a few shillings.”
“It seems that the world has gone crazy.” Rebecca cast a glance toward the stern and Big Tom. “So have some of our friends.”
Big Tom saw her glance as an invitation and came ambling forward. “Are we discussing politics, prosperity, or feminine beauty?”
“Politics determines prosperity,” said Rebecca. “Beauty has no part in it.”
“But beauty is its own prosperity,” said Big Tom, “both to the beautiful and to those who look upon beauty to… to… find prosperity.”
“Beauty,” she answered dryly, “is also a well-organized thought.”
Big Tom grinned. He was a hard one to insult. “I leave organized thinkin’ to my brother. He writes things like the Annapolis Resolves: ‘Stop exports, resist tea imports, withhold debt service till we get to do our taxin’ ourselves.’… Strong thoughts to go with my strong arm.”
“Impoverished thoughts, mindless brawn,” she said.
But Big Tom kept grinning. “And they’ve built us a fine, strong business.”
“And that’s somethin’ to consider, darlin’.” Nervous Duncan gave his daughter a wink.
Jedediah elbowed Nervous Duncan. “Hitchin’ Rebecca to a merchant shipper would be—”
“An arranged marriage.” Rebecca drew from her purse a snuffbox, but instead of taking a pinch in each nostril, she carefully placed one in her mouth, between her cheek and gum. “Just what I always hoped for.”
ii
The Annapolis Tea Party
“The genteelest town in North America.”
That was what the English rector at St. Anne’s Church had called Annapolis.
And while a long-legged man could still circumnavigate it in half an hour, Annapolis was now inhabited by fifteen hundred souls and had grown to be all that Jedediah’s father had envisioned so long ago.
It was a town built and enriched by purchase, by sale, and by shipment. This truth was proclaimed each day along Factor’s Row, at the head of the dock, where agents and buyers arranged consignments and credit and kept the wheels of commerce turning between the new world and the old. A fine market house accommodated them at the place where Main Street reached the waterfront. And when matters were not complicated by politics, the warehouses burst with the fruits of their labor.
Annapolis was not merely waterfront, however. The new capitol building was the grandest in the Colonies, and the cupola rising on its roof would make it the tallest. And each autumn, when the Assembly convened there, planters from all across the tidewater came for the entertainments that accompanied the business of government.
America’s first brick playhouse had recently opened on West Street. The new revenue house could accommodate hundreds of bowing, promenading, pirouetting dancers. The annual races drew horsemen from across the Colonies. There were card parties and musicales every night. Women wore the freshest European fashions. And in the decade since the end of the French and Indian War, no less than a dozen magnificent mansions had risen, proclaiming the wealth of the town to the world and the wealth of the owners to their peers.
When Jedediah had first heard that his older son was building a twenty-room brick palace on Prince George Street, he had called it folly. But when he had finally stood before it, he had admitted that it was the finest folly he had ever seen. So he had named it Stafford’s Fine Folly. And in the perfect symmetry of its five-part design—main house balanced by service wings and connected by hallways called hyphens—he had come to see the perfect symbol for what men were calling the Age of Reason.
So why couldn’t reasonable men reasonably settle their differences over taxation? And why, late that afternoon, did his approach to the genteelest town in North America make him so uneasy?
A month earlier, a hurricane had roared up the coast and blown the new cupola off the capitol. The market house had been destroyed. And the great walnut tree on Prince George Street, which Jedediah had always used as a landmark to find his son’s house, no longer waved in the breeze.
But none of this bothered him so much as the quiet at the waterfront, the kind of quiet that came when yellowing black clouds closed overhead and a storm threatened to burst.
From the quarterdeck of the Hannah S., he aimed his spyglass at the dock, where a group of men were lurching out of Middleton’s tavern. Their staggerings and hoarse shouts suggested Dutch courage, and one of them was carrying a torch, though daylight lingered.
Then Jedediah turned his glass to the brig anchored off Windmill Point. “Is that the Peggy Stewart?”
“Aye,” said Big Tom. “I passed her on my way down the bay.”
“Still rides damn low in the water,” said Jedediah.
“Must still be loaded,” answered Big Tom. “Could be tea.”
“High time,” grunted Nervous Duncan Parrish.
“Annapolis Resolves prohibit the importation of tea,” said Big Tom.
“Maybe someone’s putting them to the test,” said Rebecca.
“High time,” repeated Nervous Duncan.
“High time to build more gallows,” said Rebecca.
THE TORCHES BOBBED in the approaching darkness, and the stink of hot tar fouled the air. Nothing good ever came of such things, thought old Jedediah, or from the kind of mob that was gathered at the Annapolis Liberty Tree, the big tulip poplar near the head of Prince George Street.
Standing before the mob, his white wig bowed over a sheet of paper, the torches crowding around him, was Anthony Stewart, owner of the Peggy Stewart. And beside him stood Jedediah’s own son Black Jed, who seemed to be supporting Stewart while keeping him to his task: reading an apology for paying the duty on his tea consignment.
“We do acknowledge that we have committed a most daring insult and act of the most pernicious tendency to the liberties of America.…”
“What?” Nervous Duncan asked Jedediah. “What damn foolery is this?”
“Lower your voice.” Jedediah recognized some of the faces turning toward them at the edge of the crowd, but a week-long battle of handbills and broadsides had been waged over the fate of the Peggy Stewart, and rebellious strangers had come from as far away as Baltimore.
“A pernicious tendency, Pa,” said Rebecca. “Pernicious to pay your duties.”
“What’s wrong with payin’ your duties?”
“Maybe you’d like to find out,” said a burly stranger with a boil on his nose.
Big Tom slipped himself in front of Duncan and told the stranger, “We’re gettin’ what we want, friend. Leave the old man alone.”
Someone gave the stranger a nudge, as if to warn that Big Tom was not to be trifled with.
“Thank you,” whispered Rebecca.
“No one bothers my friends,” said Big Tom.
“We’ll see that you’re not hanged,” she said.
“… And thereby we incurred the displeasure of those now convened, and others interested in the preservation of constitutional rights and liberties.…”
“My liberties are clear!” Nervous Duncan’s whine, directed only at his daughter, could be heard by half the crowd.
Someone growled that women and old men should stay by their hearth.
Rebecca spat a stream of tobacco at that, and Big Tom squared himself for trouble.
“… Therefore, we will commit to flames the detestable article which has been the cause of this, our misconduct.”
“By Christ, they’re going to burn the—” Duncan’s last word was muffled by a hand coming from behind and covering his face.
Jedediah and Big Tom grabbed the man, who wore a black hooded cape, and they struggled for a moment, until Rebecca threw off the hood and revealed her own brother. “Dunc!”
“Quiet!” hissed Duncan the Younger, of the Governor’s Council, who usually paraded about town in a silk coat, a satin brocade waistcoat, and a white peruke.
“Why the monk’s cowl?”
He ignored her and told his father, “Say nothing more.”
Suddenly the crowd was roaring again. Charles Carroll the Barrister cried, “Mr. Stewart consents to burn the tea. The Anne Arundel County Committee of Safety says that’s enough.”
“And we say tar and feathers!” cried the stranger with the boil on his nose.
“And burn his brig!” shouted a country doctor named Warfield.
“Burn his house!” shouted someone else. “Burn all their damn houses!”
Duncan the Younger whispered, “That is why we must be quiet. We’re silent partners with Stewart. If they find out, they’ll burn our house, too.”
And a new voice boomed out over the crowd. “You all know me. I’m Black Jed Stafford. And I say Stewart’s an honorable man. He’s made his apologies. Now let him burn his tea and be done with it.”
“Well spoken, son,” muttered Jedediah.
“Aye,” said Big Tom. “He’s a good talker.”
“Another we won’t hang,” whispered Rebecca.
Big Tom had always liked her spirit, from the time they were kids, and the torchlight gave her a hard-edged beauty he had not noticed before.
But the crowd did not like Black Jed’s appeal. The cries for tarring grew louder. Pillows were torn apart and the feathers tossed in the air, falling like snow into the hissing torches, giving the scene a strange and frightening festivity.
Black Jed shouted for a vote to accept destruction of the tea as restitution for its importation. Half cried yea, but the rest continued to call for something to burn, for someone to tar. It was mob rule, and it was abominable, thought old Jedediah.
As if Nervous Duncan could read his friend’s mind, he cried, “Abominable!”
“Quiet, old man,” growled the doctor.
Ale-angry faces turned toward them in the torchlight.
“I been on the Chesapeake since the days of the French pirates,” cried Nervous Duncan, “and I say you’re all worse than they ever—”
His voice cracked, as it had a million times before. Then he brought his right hand to his chest, and with his left, he reached out, grasping the space where his son had just been standing. But his son had disappeared, so Nervous Duncan fell against old Jedediah, and the mob closed around them.
“Shut that old bastard up!” screamed the one with the boil on his nose.
“Get back!” Rebecca swung her folded parasol like a cutlass to sweep the crowd away. Some of them hooted at her. Someone spat. From under the Liberty Tree, Black Jed Stafford called for calm. And the one with the boil on his nose pushed Big Tom out of the way to get at Rebecca.
That was a mistake. Big Tom delivered a fist that left the stranger with a burst boil and a broken nose. Then he pulled his flintlock from his belt, threw Nervous Duncan over his shoulder, and shouted, “Stand back, the lot of you!”
With men screaming and the torches bobbing after them, they hurried down the street to the safety of Stafford’s Fine Folly.
Jedediah knew that the mob and their torches and their hoarse-throated shouts were not for him or Nervous Duncan. They were driving Anthony Stewart to the waterfront, to make him pay for transgressing their so-called resolves. Still Jedediah ordered the slaves to bar the doors while Big Tom laid Nervous Duncan on the couch in the library and Rebecca poured brandy down the old man’s throat.
Black Jed’s wife, Sara—doe-eyed, soft-spoken, and dead-calm in a crisis—ordered one slave to fetch the doctor and another to brew tea.
But when Black Jed appeared an hour later, Nervous Duncan was dead.
“Where were you?” demanded Sara, who now held their crying baby.
“The harbor.” Black Jed’s coat was gone, his stockings and waistcoat were covered with mud. He touched the baby and left a smudge of river muck on its forehead. Then he looked at the blue and lifeless face of Nervous Duncan. “He spoke his mind. It’s a brave way to die.”
An orange flame flickered in the sky to the east.
“That’ll be the Peggy Stewart,” said Black Jed, his voice drained of energy.
“What did you do?” asked his father.
“We persuaded Stewart to ground her and burn her. I helped him do it.”
“Mobocracy. We live in a mobocracy.” Jedediah poured a shot of brandy down his own throat. “And my son’s a mobocrat.”
“They would’ve burned Stewart’s house, the Williams house… the Parrish house, too. One leaky brig for three houses… a good trade.” In the candlelight, the sharp angles of Black Jed’s face trimmed any tissue of doubt from his face.
“I thank you,” said Rebecca, “and my brother thanks you, wherever he hides.”
“He was smart to disappear,” said Big Tom. “Black Jed can argue the middle ground. Your brother can’t.”
Out over the harbor, the flames were rising higher into the air.
Jedediah thought of pirate torches on that long-ago night. “I hope you’re ready to see our ships burned, and this house—”
Black Jed lifted the baby from Sara’s arms and held it before his father. “Your grandson, christened tomorrow with water and holy oil. But look”—he pointed to the dirt on the baby’s forehead—“tonight we christen him with good Maryland soil.”
iii
A Snuffbox
The rising tide extinguished the hulk of the Peggy Stewart, and the rising sun fell upon a town that seemed unchanged. The high-peaked mansions still fought for the first rays of light. The red brick seemed even redder in the dawn. And the dew running in rivulets down the roofs turned to steam in the warming sun.
The Annapolis merchant princes had been blessed. So why would they risk all that they had built? Why would they align themselves with a mob that had so little to lose?
In the bed where he had spent a sleepless night, old Jedediah was confounded by these questions. The mob was powerful, and there were men of property and intelligence, like his sons, who would guide the mob, harness its furies, feed it a burning ship now and then, in order to… what?
On the Hannah S., where he slept like a plank, Big Tom dreamed that he had been laid over a cannon and British midshipmen were lining up to cane this Colonial son. The dream woke him, as it always did, and offered an answer for any question concerning rebellion.
