The Kingdom on the Waves Read online

  The coming days would confirm our fellow musicians’ report that Lord Dunmore had indeed abandoned his capital and now governed from a ship harbored in Chesapeake Bay; and that Governor Martin of North Carolina was in like wise fled his palace; and that both of them drifted up and down the rivers of their colonies, disrupting the shipping, threatening violence. It was then said that Dunmore harbored slaves who fled to him, and our musical companions were not alone in believing that Dunmore should soon issue a general emancipation to all Negroes as would join him.

  In the moment, I knew no particulars beyond what they had spoken. But still, I was transported, envisioning ranks upon ranks of men of my Africk nation, marching forth from ships, armed and disciplined, halloed from plantations, met with rejoicing, as streaks of liberation spread like verdigris across this tarnished colonial sky.

  I stumbled on my part, too lost in reverie, and the flautist fixed me with a look most vexed.

  Late that night, as, back at Staniford Street, I unloaded my pockets of biscuits and treats for the delight of my tutor, he asked me how had gone the dance, and I told him of Lord Dunmore’s rumored ire and his thought of clemency for loyal slaves, and I recalled to Dr. Trefusis that Pro Bono was thought fled to His Lordship’s side.

  Said I, “We are an army that but waits to be mustered. We shall join whosoever doth free us first.”

  Dr. Trefusis paused in his enjoyment of a rusk. “Oh, my dear boy. Hope as you will. I fear, however — I greatly fear — that on this side, General Howe and his minions are too much affrighted at the wrath of the wealthy to cut the shackles; and on the other, the rebel Congress in Philadelphia is full, leech to luff, of slave-owners who have no earthly enticement or incentive to free their servants and beggar themselves. Their estates would fall to ruin.”

  I slowly laid out sweets upon our little table, disheartened by so glum a prognostication. To Dr. Trefusis, I delivered scraps of turkey pulled from a carcass. He approached the flesh with relish, pinning it to his rusk with a thumb and devouring it.

  Outside, there was a racket of crows, startled by some passerby in the street. They bickered, and we heard them retreat over the roofs.

  I asked my tutor, “Sir, was Mr. Sharpe right? Is everything done for self-interest or profit?”

  Dr. Trefusis shrank back, eyed me cannily, and ceased to chew.

  I renewed my inquiries. “Sir?”

  “The inimitable Locke,” he answered, “saith that mankind is engaged in perpetual uneasiness, and that it is lack which motivates us forward. In our desires, we resemble the action of a two-legged table.”

  I watched him eat the heel of his bread. I urged, “You yourself are proof of the selfless benevolence of man. You have submitted yourself to ruin so that you might save me. Surely you are an example of kindness without profit?”

  He frowned his thin lips and his lined cheeks. He lay down his bread. He reached out a hand and pushed away the cakes on the table. His water he left idle.

  With a harshness of accent not usually his, he said, “I shall relate a fable.” He rearranged himself on his chair, and began: “Let us imagine that there is a man,” said he, “who, when young, traveled about the Continent, enjoying numerous petits amours with young ladies with whom . . . he was not always . . . entirely forward with all aspects of the truth, regarding the length of his stay — nor of anything else, i’faith. . . . Let us note in passing: Voltaire, in his Philosophical Dictionary, maintains that self-love is like the penis: It is necessary; it is dear to us; it gives us pleasure; mankind could not continue without it; and yet things proceed more agreeably, with less of shrieking, when it is stowed.

  “Now fancy for thyself that hadst thou asked this youth, ‘Sir, do you love these chambermaids, these milliners’ girls?’ — if thou hadst asked, ‘Do you love your hot-breathed country nuns, smelling of their cattle?’ — he would have vowed upon his honor he loved them indeed . . . and would have swore truthfully that he thought of them often — with noble melancholy — as he slipped away at noon and rode from them forever.

  “Let us figure for ourselves that this man, this young libertine, engaged daily in concocting a philosophy of Eros and in visiting the great courts of Europe, heard occasional rumors that the previous year’s late dalliances of a few weeks had borne fruit . . . and that, were he to return west to scenes of earlier pleasure, he would find himself a father several times over. And so, hearing of his paternity, he rode further east — first to Prussia, and later, into the forests of the Magyar.

  “Then imagine that youth passed, and manhood, and he crossed the seas, fleeing from court to court, and he came to the end of his years, and discovered he had been loved by none, though his grandchildren, it was not impossible, were spread as thick as Abraham’s through the hovels of Christendom. Imagine that he faced his own dissolution. Imagine that waiting for him on the other side of the grim portal were neither the shrieks of the damned nor the harp glissandi of the saved, but rather the stone chill of a vacuum, the failure of a machine. An instant, and the self ceased.

  “Then you might imagine how he longed for one who depended upon him, who said, ‘I shall remember you as one who gave me life.’ Imagine how he might yearn for one whom he might use as a grandchild.”

  Hearing his tale, my heart swelled with pity, and I put my hand upon his wrist; but he shook it off. He stood and walked to his bed.

  “Altruism,” he concluded, “is the kind of pie best eaten with a lot of gravy and little inspection of the kind of kidney it’s stuffed with.”

  The air grew colder. Fuel being scarce, and the Staniford Street house being draughty, I offered my services to a work crew in exchange for wood. The soldiers were similarly in need; my work-detail was given orders to assist them in pulling down rows of houses and wharves in the South End, where these structures should be replaced by a line of defensive works.

  Demolishment was an excellent sport for me; I welcomed the savagery of axe and beetle. The peril of being trapped within the city, without hope of change until some calamity, weighed heavily upon me. I thought drearily on the clamoring of rebels in the streets of Williamsburg, the flight of royal authority from that beleaguered capital; I thought on the rebels who surrounded us, baying for liberty and offering none themselves; and I, rehearsing the indignities suffered by my people of Africk hue; the tortures; recalling the ships still plying the waves with more of us in their holds; the howling of rebels anxious to see us bound; their brutal Congress, full of men who spake of vaunted reason; examining the need, the anger, the infant wail and grasping which allowed them to cast aside logic and enthymeme, the valid and the true — I was full of fury.

  Destruction, therefore, was apt divertissement; and with each blow of the hammer upon the beams, I forgot further my former years and my present predicaments, and rather occupied myself in calculations of stress and impact, and how I might best avoid nails.

  I was sensible of a new excitement. I had waited and hid, and what I had ever feared was conflict: first, in the rebel camp, dreading the issuing forth of the Royal Army to destroy us; then, enchained, anticipating some dire fate in the College of Lucidity; and finally, here, surrounded in this city invested by rebels with no action taken, awaiting the summation of this siege — always constrained — always inert — but now I desired justice eruptive.

  I now imagined violence — the bayonet-thrust, the detonation — the report of a musket — as the hard sublimate of speech I had curtailed through years, all the moments when I had silently inclined my head, these suppressed words of outrage now become indurated into some dire rhetoric, an oration so loud and so decisive, ’twould cause bodies to topple, and walls to fall, and I might surge forwards with the others — for so I saw us now, Negroes of the King’s Army, unleashed at last, our fury speaking, and never more to scrape before the cruelties of gentlemen. This, from one who was ever pacific in nature.

  So doth a man change from one moment to the next. So did I change, and become by
degrees, without knowing, a soldier.

  Beneath maples turned scarlet, scarlet soldiers sawed, as fire turns upon itself, devouring.

  We presented The Blockade of Boston, Major-General Burgoyne’s farce upon rebel hypocrisy, as one of the most celebrated events of our hivernal concert series. It was to be the last concert I played.

  The preparations that evening were hectic, for it was to be acted by the officers themselves for the entertainment of not simply their peers and commanders, but also their troops, who were become restless with their long confinement. The officers, little acclimated to the exertions of drama — and the great rule, I have found, with stagecraft is that drama begets drama — filled the retiring-chambers of Faneuil Hall with their shouts and remonstrances as they were painted and clothed. There a man who had but a few months before stood proud upon the field, conducting men down some declivity with bayonets fixed, now, flustered with comedy, repeated lines while his valet drew lids upon his eyes. There drummers who sounded the advance and retreat across the battlefields thumped upon the skins of their raucous instruments, judging the quality of the attack. Here a man dressed as General Washington in hay-filled wig brandished a rusty sword.

  In the midst of the preparations, Mr. Turner approached me. “Augustus,” said he, “a moment.”

  I stepped aside to allow passage for a bustle of men who dragged a wooden howitzer.

  Said Mr. Turner, “I have, at long last, recognized you. Some years ago you played a devilish ugly Tartini article for a subscription concert.”

  I assented; and he, in his curious way, was not unforward in his praise, saying, “Excellent. I recall it as a beautiful head-ache. Con spirito. Perhaps con spirito maligno. There was about it a whiff of sulphur; maybe sal ammoniac.”

  I averred that I was honored by his recollection, no less than by his attendance upon the first performance.

  “Perhaps you should play a more prominent part in the orchestra.”

  “You honor me with your notice, sir.”

  “Famous,” said he. “Cracking. For our next concert, I shall shift you to play with the first violins.”

  “May I express my gratitude to you for the opportunity, no less sweet for being unsought, and the hope that I shall prove in every respect —”

  “I’faith, you’d dull a man to death. Go move chairs.”

  We organized the chairs before the dais and lit the candles upon the stands so that the hall sparkled with illumination. My spirits were in a tumult: On the one hand, my heart trembled with anticipation of future performance; and I found myself surprised with hope that the siege should never end — for did it end, there ended also my freedom in this band, this glorious exercise of all I found most pleasant and agreeable; and I absurdly wished we could remain here, ever stranded, nestled in this tenuous moment; and yet, at the selfsame instant, I thought on those who encircled us, threatening, and wished my joy at the liberties I now took could blast them where they stood, that the brilliance of defiance might destroy forever those who prated of freedom and denied it so coarsely; and having thought thus, I found my hands wishing for a more devastating instrument than a violin; and scarcely was sensible of which emotion extended dominion over my disorganized nerves.

  I tuned, frowning, and concentrated upon the music at hand.

  The seats were filling with officers in full uniform and their ladies; in remoter areas, the rank and file were admitted to celebrate their favorite Regimental commanders in this act of buffoonage. In the farthest balcony, unaccompanied women in masks raised their fans to obscure their pox-marks, observed by men guessing at identity.

  We sat through a farce entitled The Busy-Body, with jests regarding stays and lecherous inspections of bosoms.

  When its badinage was completed, we picked up our instruments and began to play the overture for The Blockade of Boston.

  For the benefit of the untried officers who acted in the piece, we had sat many times through some portions: General Washington seducing a widow, so he might melt down her family pewter for bullets; comic numbers for rustic paupers singing of their sheep; a chorus of effeminate Harvardians, full of the pious cant of Puritan theology, which sour ephebes spurred on rough apprentices to fight for them and then wept and hid when battle began, terrified they should lose their lives or, far worse, their fortunes; we had seen also a bumptious dialogue between two ragged colonial majors, one a shoemaker by trade, the other a dentist’s apprentice, each protesting their fellow-feeling while picking the other’s pocket. Finally, I had witnessed with some interest a ballad we played mocking the rebels’ Congress for crying, in the midst of wealth and luxury, that England had enslaved them, while all the time holding slaves themselves and trading Negroes at cards.

  We finished the overture’s concluding fugato. The action opened in Watertown, which was painted upon old linens; General Washington stomped out from the wings, his jacket ill-fitting and crude. He opened his mouth to speak the prologue.

  Abruptly, one of the King’s soldiers, dressed in the costume of a serjeant of the militia, rushed out the wings and sprinted to the center of the stage, shoving the Commander-in-Chief of the rebel faction to the side with little ceremony — and declared in Hibernian accents, “Turn out! Turn out! They are at it, hammer and tongs! The rebels!”

  He paused, the audience gaped; he cried, by way of amplification, “Tooth and nail!”

  The theater was for a moment silent.

  Washington, knocked asunder, reeled and brayed, “I say,” seizing the King’s soldier by the arm and struggling with him.

  The two wrestled there for a moment, which sight was enough to actuate laughter and applause in all who watched — as the two grunted there — until the King’s soldier, bursting free of Washington’s elbows, cried, “What the deuce are you all about? If you won’t believe me, by Jesus, you need only go to the door, and there you will see!”

  Despite the action of the drama was somewhat confused, the audience still liked it well enough, it clearly conducing to the debasement of the rebel General, so they laughed again; but the story became even more unaccountable as the soldier addressed the audience again, pleading, “Sirs! M’lords! At Charlestown! The rebels are attacking the mill-dam at Charlestown!”

  This time, there was no laughter; merely an astonished silence. An anxiety at what was real and what was display beset us. Some few men started to rise from their seats.

  Major-General Burgoyne, dressed as a cow-herd, rushed onto the stage. “It is not in the script!” he cried. “The man speaks truth!”

  For one moment longer, stupor held court; his scepter was absolute and we all were subjected unto him.

  And then chaos usurped with his animal junto.

  Officers rose and there was a general clamor; a woman wailed; from the wings, through luffing coulisses, men ran panting, wiping paint from their faces upon their oznabrig sleeves. There was a struggle on the stairs. The doors bristled with men in panic. Officers hauled themselves off the stage, shoving and pushing amidst the orchestra as we hastily turned aside that they might pass — one slid beneath the harpsichord for avenue — while in the audience, men groped to climb over seats, heaving themselves up, boots on velvet cushions; ladies rising and sitting; one fainting; cries for help; no language left but jabbering.

  I held up my violin so it might not be smashed by colonels who clambered over my lap.

  Regimental commanders shouted for order, but there was no maintaining it. Chairs were kicked over. Women suffered the assaults of their neighbors climbing towards freedom.

  Gradually, the theater emptied, Mr. Turner shouting to us that we, at least, must remain stationary and minimize, rather than enhance, the violence of the rout.

  Once the way was clear, we dispersed toward the doors.

  In the market square, we found ragged companies forming, several led by men habited as milkmaids.

  As I wandered home — little fearing, amidst the confusion, any harassment — I passed individua
l soldiers sprinting down alleys, seeking their station.

  In the streets, companies marched.

  Through the ways of the city, I heard the call of the drums, beating the soldiers into formation.

  At Mrs. Platt’s house, we ascended to the roof, where she had watched the burning of Charlestown some months before. Sally and I prepared tea and brought it up for the widow, Dr. Trefusis, and her old servant, Jacob, who was wrapped in blankets.

  Not much could be seen on the other side of the channel; bursts of flame that illuminated only smoke. As we observed, Dr. Trefusis delivered a proud oration on how none could truly see, but all the world was smoke, flame, and night; and we stumblers in that obscurity, glimpsing figures that struggled and fell; which discourse I could not attend to, for my thoughts were deep engaged upon another matter.

  “What,” said Sally to Dr. Trefusis, “will you be diving off the roof to your death, now you’ve said your pretty speeches?”

  Swifts roused by the volleys rose and called in darkness.

  There are vistas which not only gratify with a demonstration of geography, but which act as the cartographers of our history, mapping time itself; so, then, this prospect: which took in, at a swivel of the head, the spires of Boston, its brick houses and slate roofs, its hills, on which campfires burned and murky Redcoats paraded; and indeed, one could make out, featureless from this vantage in this dark, the Novanglian College of Lucidity’s town-house, where I had spent my youth; and there, across the Bay, were ships of the line awaiting combat, quiescent and pregnant with menace; their tenders cutting across the waves; and to the northwest, across the Charles, the heights of Breed’s and Bunker Hills, which I, with my own hands, had helped fortify for the rebels, at the side of Mr. G—g, but which works now were in the hands of the King’s Army, and hotly disputed. Far in the blue distance, I believed I could see the hills of Stow and Concord and Canaan, where Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Gitney still dwellt, for all I knew, in their experimental chambers, conducting trials in the dead of night. Behind us, the moon shone down upon the mud-flats of Roxbury, where Dr. Trefusis and I had struggled for our lives against the rising tide. Bound here together beneath the wind and touched by the tide were rebel and regular, Tory and Whig, all scrutinizing each other across the blue spaces between them, awaiting the moment either might rally and seize the landscape for their own.