Annapolis, page 7
Biddle’s lieutenants clustered around him, and Big Tom asked, “Shall we change our headin’, sir?”
Biddle glanced at the sun, which was not far from setting. “Haul to windward. This stranger seems so intent on catching us, we’ll make it easy for him.”
Two hours later, a quarter moon hung like a feeble lantern on the eastern horizon. The black shadow of the British ship—she looked to be a frigate—had already passed the lead vessel in Biddle’s squadron, arrogantly firing a warning shot and demanding that the little sloop identify itself. Now, she was bearing down on the Randolph.
Big Tom, commander of the bow guns—one, three, and five on the larboard side—stood at his station, as close to the enemy as he could get, right in harm’s way. When the action began, he would begin it. He whispered to his gunners to blow up their matches, and the flames glowed like spirits in their hands.
“She’s in for a surprise, lads,” he whispered.
It was then that he heard a gasp from the number one gun.
“Quiet,” he growled.
“She ain’t no frigate.” It was Jake Mifflin. “She’s a goddamn two-decker.”
A two-decker. Bloody Christ!
Now she was close enough that Big Tom could make out the whole black mass of her. A two-decker for certain. Sixty-four guns, half of them run out on the port side, ready to deliver three times the weight of iron the Randolph could throw.
“Who are you?” came a voice from the darkened Englishman. “Hoist your colors or we’ll fire into you.”
We should have run, thought Big Tom.
But there would be no running with Nicholas Biddle on the quarterdeck. He shouted, “This is the Continental frigate Randolph!”
And up went the Grand Union.
“Fire!” screamed Biddle.
And thirteen jets of flame shot out of the Randolph. Thirteen iron balls stunned the Englishman the way a small man stuns a big one with a surprise blow.
Then the Englishman let loose with a crushing explosion and a blinding burst of muzzle-flash light. Big Tom did not see all that happened, but he saw Jake Mifflin’s mid-section burst open by a cannonball as though he were a melon struck with a rock, and again he thought, We should have run.
Then he regained himself and cried, “Sponge your guns!”
But the crews were already doing it—sponging the barrels, loading linen bags of powder, then solid shot, running out the guns, pricking pins through their touchholes to break the powder bags, then—
“Fire!”
And stand where the Lord put you.
Before the Englishman could fire back, the well-drilled Randolph gunners drove three more broadsides into her, shattering planks, tearing up rigging, ripping off limbs. Meanwhile marines in the fighting tops were raining musket balls at British officers, at the gun captains, and, most importantly, at the powder monkeys—boys chosen for their small size and nimble feet, who could race through the smoke and blood, dodge recoiling guns and falling bodies, to fetch powder bags from the magazine in the bowels of the ship.
The Englishman lost her mizzen top and her bowsprit. Blood ran on her decks. But before long, it ran just as black on the decks of the Randolph.
For fifteen minutes, flurry after flurry, cannon flash after flash, the Randolph drove her iron fists into the Englishman and withstood every blow the Englishman landed. But neither could knock the other down, and finally they pulled apart.
Big Tom stayed at his station, encouraged his men, and called for his powder monkey.
Nicholas Biddle, crippled by a splinter wound in the thigh, sat on a stool and ordered his ship about for another go at the Englishman.
The men at the guns cheered.
Big Tom shouted that this time they would take her maintop and cripple her for certain. It was the last thing he said… or thought.
Because in the next instant the Randolph blew up… exploded into a million pieces… disappeared in a flash as bright as day… consumed by its own flames and swallowed in a great cloud of smoke that rained fittings and planks, cannon barrels and casks, and the vaporized essence of two hundred and fifty men onto the surface of the sea.
No one would ever know what had happened.
But Big Tom Stafford had stood where the Lord put him.
ix
A Woman’s Fury
Black Jed brought the news of Tom’s death to the Patuxent.
Old Jedediah stood on the dock, overlooking the broad river that Big Tom had navigated so many times, and he cried. Then he went up to the house and closed his door and spoke to no one… for three days.
Meanwhile Black Jed rode upstream to Parrish Manor.
The house was handsomer than Stafford Hall—a classic structure of two full stories, set on a hill above the river. But rebellion had been hard on Loyalists like the Parrishes, who could not trade tobacco and had been forced to turn instead to subsistence farming. The docks had fallen into disrepair. Chickens and hogs ran about shitting in front of the house. And the shit stuck to Black Jed’s boots.
When she heard Black Jed’s news, Rebecca said only that she hoped one brother would honor the commitments of another. It was hardly the reaction of a lover.
“I have no intention of marrying you,” answered Black Jed sarcastically.
“Just save my family’s Annapolis house.”
“Had your brother not gone to the Loyalist enclaves of London—”
“But I’ve remained, and I own a third of the house.”
“Why have you stayed?”
“I was born here. The Maryland earth is in my bones.”
“Is it true that your brother raises money to support Loyalist brigades?”
“If he does, he does not do it well, considerin’ how paltry the Loyalist efforts have been in the field.”
Two hard questions, thought Black Jed, and two glib answers. He tried one more. “Did you love my brother?”
“No. And he did not love me.”
“But you said he intended to marry you.”
“Let us say we had an understanding that involved certain marital privileges.”
And Black Jed almost laughed because, in this, he knew his brother well.
THE FRENCH JOINED the fight that year, and colonial rebellion became global war. The Royal Navy was forced to loosen its grip on the Chesapeake, and for a time, Maryland ships sailed out with tobacco and back with European manufacture. The Staffords profited, and Black Jed invested in more blockade-runners, leaving others to privateer.
But something ugly was happening. It was called depreciation. To finance the war, the Continental Congress kept printing money with nothing backing it up. More and more of it was needed to buy less and less, and paper was never as good as French gold or a man’s personal promise to pay at full value after the war.
At the end of 1778, a dollar in specie—gold or silver—was worth five Continental dollars. A year later, it was worth forty; a year after that, ninety. To a man who took payment in Continentals or Maryland currency, it was a long, hard slide. And Black Jed made it even harder on himself by speculating in paper money, buying it for five cents on the dollar, then one cent.
Someone, he said, had to show faith in the government. Someone had to keep faith with those who had died.
But things only grew worse.
The French were dilatory allies, and British ships were soon back in the Chesapeake, supporting armies attempting to cut off the southern colonies. The flow of goods to Annapolis was reduced, and a government in need of hard money finally turned to those deserted Loyalist houses.
The Confiscation Bill was passed in January of 1781. Properties were put up for auction across Maryland, but Continental money was not accepted. Personal credit or specie only.
Several Annapolis properties went quickly, like Lloyd Dulany’s house, which fetched 2,745 pounds from an innkeeper. Most of the commissioners for the sale of confiscated British properties wanted to take the Parrish house outright, especially since an army of green-coated Loyalists, funded from London, had been raiding the lower Chesapeake with Benedict Arnold.
But Black Jed Stafford argued that Rebecca Parrish should not be made to pay for her brother’s transgressions on the far side of the Atlantic. She should be treated like other Loyalists whose Annapolis homes were safe, those who had simply retreated to the country and stayed out of the fight.
He argued hard, as he had done when the mob burned the Peggy Stewart, and he forged a compromise. The Parrish house would be sold and one third of the profits given to one-third owner Rebecca Parrish. It was taken for 2,100 pounds by a Baltimore speculator who paid in gold. Out of this sum military creditor Black Jed Stafford received 300 pounds in specie, which greatly improved his own financial picture, despite his misgivings at accepting it.
A WEEK LATER, Jedediah greeted his son in the blood-colored study at Stafford Hall. He had his arm over a basin of warm water, and leathery old Doc Nearling was crouched beside him.
“More bleeding, Pa?” said Black Jed.
“Best thing I know for dropsy,” said Doc.
Jedediah grunted and tightened his heavy legs as Doc Nearling’s lancet sliced into his radial vein. When the blood appeared, the old doctor untied the tourniquet, then massaged the vein, coaxing the blood to come. Then he slid the arm into the basin, and in a moment, the stream was fast and red.
“I know why you come down here,” said old Jedediah, keeping his eyes on his son so as not to look into the basin.
“Rebecca Parrish—”
“She’s called down vengeance on you. It’s the talk of the river.”
“That it is,” said the old doctor. “Heard it myself when I went to tend her.”
“Tend her?”
“Caught her hand in a well wheel. Lost two fingers. Took ’em off myself. Asked her why she was fetchin’ water when one of the slaves could do it, and she just said she was thirsty. Makes sense, I reckon.”
“Will she play the harp again?”
Doc Nearling grunted. “One-handed, maybe.”
Black Jed told his father that he was going to Parrish Manor. “When I get back, I want you packed. I’m takin’ you to Annapolis.”
“I ain’t leavin’ Doc Nearling. He’s the one keepin’ me alive.” Old Jedediah yawned as the blood drained out of him.
“We’ll talk on that later.” Black Jed believed a man who did not care for his father was no man, even if his father was as stubborn as an oak stump. And a man who would not face his accuser was no man, either. So Black Jed rode to Parrish Manor, which looked even worse than it had on his last visit.
Rebecca’s sister-in-law, a frail yellow-haired woman, led Black Jed to the parlor, where Rebecca sat with the drapes pulled and her harp forlornly beside her.
“Who is it?” she growled.
“Black Jed Stafford.” He could see nothing but a shadow.
She raised her head. “Bastard.”
“How is your hand?”
“Do you know what it’s like to make music in the most perfect shaft of sunlight on earth?” Her despair sounded as dark as the room. “And then to know that you will never play again, never sit in that sunlight again?”
He dropped the bag of gold guineas on the table in front of her. “Your share.”
“You broke your promise.”
“I did what I could. Had your brother not funded Loyalist brigades—”
“He’s no better than you. A man of talk and money who pays others to fight for him. A coward. Big Tom was the only man among you.”
“I did what I could.”
Tobacco hit the spittoon. Then the shadow moved its arm, the hand dipped into the folds of the dress, and a flintlock appeared. “You didn’t do enough.”
The muzzle flash nearly blinded Black Jed. He was so close he could taste the saltpeter in the gunpowder, but he could not feel the wound, and he could not believe that Rebecca Parrish had missed from so close. Then he realized that the bullet had buried itself in the bag of hard money between them.
She spat a stream of tobacco and called him a coward again.
And that was the last he saw of Rebecca Parrish during the rebellion. But the word “coward” echoed in his head until March, when a skinny, sallow, redheaded Frenchman named the Marquis de Lafayette arrived with a thousand troops, bound for Virginia to battle Benedict Arnold’s raiders.
x
Black Jed Makes a Stand
In Annapolis, Black Jed saw to the supply and comfort of Lafayette’s troops, and when the French fleet could not get through to support them, Black Jed collected the barges to take them back up the bay. Then two British warships appeared off the Severn—the Monk, twenty guns, and the Hope, eighteen—and Lafayette was blockaded.
“General Washington, he is most grateful of all you have done,” said Lafayette over a meal of smoked ham at Stafford’s Fine Folly. He wore the blue-and-buff uniform of a Continental officer, and he ate with the mannered delicacy of a girl.
“I’ve used my money.” Black Jed packed his pipe. “You’ve risked your life.”
“My husband is too modest,” said Sara from the other end of the long table. She wore a blue dress that plumped her breasts and made her look most enticing. “In truth, we’ve risked everything. We’ve even lost a brother.”
Lafayette raised his glass to the portrait of Big Tom above the fireplace. “Your brother is an inspiration.”
“We do not want to lose anything else.” Sara leaned forward, giving Lafayette a better view of her charms. “If you stay here, sir, the British won’t dare attack us.”
Black Jed cleared his throat to let her know he saw through her coquetry.
“Many ’ave asked me to stay. But mon général, ’e orders that I return.” Lafayette smiled coyly at Black Jed. “The British make this more difficult, unless someone with the blood of a ’ero, like your brother, chooses to help.”
Black Jed blew smoke out his nose. He saw through Lafayette, too, but he said without hesitation, “I’ll lead you out in the Sara. It’s the last of my brother’s ships. We’ll hold off the British until you’re away.”
“Mon général will not forget you, m’sieur.”
Sara was furious, and when they went to bed, she let Black Jed know it. “You should not be risking your life. We should be keeping Lafayette here.”
“Do I smell jasmine?”
“Why did you promise your help? You have nothing to prove. You stood for the idea of rebellion and backed up your beliefs with your fortune.”
“Big Tom would have done it.” He slipped his arms around her. She was thirty now. She had borne one child, lost two others, but still felt slim and girlish. He buried his face in the brown hair that cascaded down her back, and after a few moments he whispered, “Listen.”
“To what?”
“How silent our house is… like a church.”
In the darkness, she rolled toward him. Her breath was warm and sweet. He felt the press of her belly and breasts against him, and he responded like a boy, although he was thirty-nine.
He raised her nightgown. “One son for the soil and one for the sea.”
“Or, if we’re lucky, a daughter for me.” Sara raised a leg and slipped herself onto him, and they went like that, on their sides, facing each other, and when they were done, she was crying.
“Sara—”
“I’ve always feared that if we lose, the British will do to us what we’ve done to the Loyalists… confiscate our home, leave us with nothing.… Now I fear—”
“All the more reason for me to stand where the Lord has put me.”
THE NEXT DAY, a fair wind blew from the northwest, and Black Jed wanted to vomit. But he was more frightened of showing fear than he was of the British. So he kept his breakfast in his stomach and stuck to his plan.
His Sara was armed with six-pounders, no match for the twelve-pounders the British ships carried. But before dawn, he had manhandled two eighteen-pounders from the earthworks onto the Sara and her little consort, Colonel Nicholson’s Starling, positioning the guns as bow chasers. Now his two ships came down the bay, trailed by the troop-laden barges of Lafayette.
Out beyond Greenbury Point, the British tacked back and forth like nervous dogs peeing on the edges of new turf.
At the maximum range for the eighteen-pounders, Black Jed gave the order to fire. The big guns roared, and a splash of water exploded just astern of the Monk, making her skitter away.
On the barges, the men cheered and guffawed.
Black Jed’s guns barked again and again in the morning air. But the British answered with nothing more than a few ranging shots that fell far short, because while Black Jed bared his teeth, he also kept his distance.
Finally the British hounds hauled their wind and showed their tails.
Perhaps they feared the damage the eighteen-pounders could do. Or maybe they feared a fight with an enemy who had the wind, the tide, and the local knowledge. Or maybe, as the story was told later, they heard that Black Jed Stafford was in command of the American ships and out to avenge his brother.
THAT FALL, THE French fleet stopped the British from sailing up the Chesapeake. French and Continental troops marched through Annapolis on their way down the Chesapeake. And Washington bagged the British army at Yorktown.
Old Jedediah said the French papists had finally made amends to America. He had moved at last to Annapolis. His ankles had swollen so badly that they looked like sausages stuffed into his shoes. He had grown another chin. His big belly drooped toward his knees. His breathing was more work by the week. And no amount of bleeding seemed to help.
His last conversation with his son took place in the garden behind the Fine Folly one warm December day. “The Lord has given you a country. Build it right and protect it with a good navy, like the French used to help us stop the British, like we could have used to stop the French seventy years ago. Then hurry up and have that son for the sea.”
“By the grace of God, Pa. By the grace of God.”
xi
Christmas Visitors
Two years later, December laurels decorated the portraits of old Jedediah and Big Tom. The son for the sea hung over the dining room fireplace. His father’s likeness hung between the windows. And their eyes were locked forever in a gaze that by turns seemed affectionate, challenging, angry, and conspiratorial, like the expressions that passed each day between Black Jed and his son Charlton.
