MAIL WAS DELIVERED to the printshop at all hours of the day—and, not infrequently, the night—and by all manner of messengers. Philadelphia gloried in the best postal system in the colonies, this having been established by Benjamin Franklin only three years before; post riders rode regularly between New York and Philadelphia and over thirty other routes through the colonies.
Given the nature of Fergus’s business and the nature of the times, though, almost as much mail arrived by older routes: passed along by travelers, merchants, Indians, and soldiers, and shoved under the door in the night watches. Or handed to a member of the family in the street. It was exchanges of that sort during the British occupation of the city that had compelled me to marry John Grey in order to avoid arrest for sedition and spying.
John’s own letter, though, arrived sedately in the pouch of a postal rider, properly stamped, and sealed with a blob of yellow wax imprinted with his signet in the shape of a smiling half-moon.
To Mrs. James Fraser, Fraser’s Printshop, Philadelphia
From Lord John Grey, Wilbury House, New York
My dear,
I am with my brother and his regiment in New York, and am like to remain here for some time. That being so, I thought I would mention that the Lease of my house on Chestnut Street will run until the End of the Year, and as the Thought of it being left empty to be vandalized or left to ruin distresses me, I conceived the Notion of offering it to you once again.
Not, I hasten to add (lest your intransigent Husband be reading this), as a Domicile but rather as Premises for a Surgery. Acquainted as I am with your peculiar Habit of attracting Persons suffering from Disease, Deformity, or hideous Injury, and being also well acquainted with the Number of Persons presently inhabiting the younger Mr. Fraser’s printing Establishment, I believe you may find your medical Adventures more easily accommodated in Chestnut Street than between a Printing Press and a towering Stack of sixpenny Bibles bound in buckram.
As I do not expect you to spend your valuable Time in domestic Labor, I have arranged for Mrs. Figg and a Servant of her choice to remain in my employment for so long as you require them, being paid through my Bank. You will greatly oblige me, my dear, by accepting this Proposition, as it will put my mind at ease regarding the Property. And the Thought of you at work, earnestly administering a Clyster to General Arnold, will greatly enliven the Tedium of my present Condition.
Your most obedient Servant,
John
“What are ye smiling at, Mother Claire?” Marsali inquired, observing me with the letter in hand. She smiled, teasing. “Has someone sent ye a billet-doux?”
“Oh, something of the sort,” I said, folding it up. “You wouldn’t know where Jamie is just now, would you?”
She closed one eye to assist thought, keeping the other on Henri-Christian, who was industriously blacking his father’s best boots—and a good deal of himself in the process.
“He said he was going wi’ Young Ian to see a man about a horse,” she said, “and then to the docks.”
“The docks?” I said in surprise. “Did he say why?”
She shook her head. “I could maybe guess, though. That’ll do, Henri! A Dhia, the state of you! Go find one o’ your sisters and tell her to wash your hands for ye, aye?”
Henri looked at his hands, as though astonished to find them completely black.
“Oui, Maman,” he said, and, cheerfully wiping them on his breeches, scampered out into the kitchen, bellowing, “Félicité! Come wash me!” at the top of his lungs.
“Why?” I asked, moving closer and lowering my voice slightly—for obviously she’d got rid of Henri-Christian on the little pitchers–big ears principle.
“He’s been talking wi’ Fergus about going with ye, when ye go back to North Carolina,” she said. “If I had to guess, I’d say he’s gone to find out what it might cost to move everything”—she made a sweeping gesture, encompassing everything from printing press to loft—“by ship.”
“Hmm,” I said, as noncommittally as possible, though my heart had leapt—at both the thought of imminent departure for the Ridge and the thought that Fergus and Marsali might come with us. “Do you . . . want to?” I asked cautiously, seeing the line between her brows. She was still a lovely woman, fair and fine-boned, but she was too thin, and the lines of strain sharpened her features.
She shook her head, but in indecision rather than negation.
“I really dinna ken,” she admitted. “It’s a good bit easier now, wi’ the British gone—but they’re no so far away, are they? They could come back, and then what?” She glanced uneasily over her shoulder, though the print-shop was empty for the moment. Fergus had had to leave home and live furtively on the outskirts of the city, during the last months of the British occupation.
I opened my mouth to tell her that I doubted this. Hal Grey had told me, under the influence of ganja, that the new British strategy was to sever the southern colonies from the North and suppress the rebellion there, thus starving the North into submission. But I closed it without speaking. Best not to mention that until I found out whether Jamie had told Fergus.
Why didn’t I bloody know what was going to happen? I asked myself in frustration—and not for the first time. Why hadn’t I thought to brush up on American history when I had the chance?
Well, because I hadn’t expected to end up in America, was the answer. Just went to show, I supposed. Pointless to spend too much time in planning, anyway, given the propensity of life to make sudden left-hand turns without warning.
“It would be wonderful, if you were to come,” I said, as mildly as possible, adding craftily, “so nice to have the children nearby.”
Marsali snorted, giving me a sideways glance.
“Aye,” she said dryly. “Never think I dinna appreciate the value of a grannie. And when ye leave, Grannie Janet will go, too.”
“Do you think so?” I hadn’t thought of that. “But Jenny loves you and your children—Fergus is as much a son to her as any of the boys she bore.”
“Well, that’s maybe true,” she admitted, with a brief smile that showed me the radiant fifteen-year-old who had married Fergus on a Caribbean beach twelve years before. “But Young Ian’s her youngest, ken? And she’s had too little of him. Now he’s wed, she’ll want to be nearby, to help wi’ his bairns when they come. And ye ken Rachel will go where Ian does—and Ian will go where Da does.”
That was a shrewd assessment, I thought, and gave her a brief nod of agreement and respect.
She sighed deeply and, sitting down in her nursing chair, took up the topmost item in the brimming mending basket, the threaded needle still sticking up from the garment where she’d last put it down. I had no desire to abandon the conversation and, pulling out a stool, sat down beside her and plucked one of Germain’s stockings out of the basket. The workbasket, with its housewife, thread balls, and darning egg, was set beside the mending, and I deftly threaded my own needle, feeling pleased that I could still do that without putting on my spectacles.
“What about Fergus?” I asked bluntly. Because plainly Fergus was the crux of the matter, where Marsali was concerned.
“Aye, that’s the rub,” she said frankly. “I’d go, and happy, but ye ken how it was for him when we stayed on the Ridge.”
I did, and grimaced slightly, stretching the heel of the stocking over the darning egg.
“It’s been dangerous in the city, this last year,” she said, and swallowed at the memory. “Couldna tell ye how many times the soldiers came to arrest him; they broke up the shop, more than once, when they couldna find him. And the Loyalists would come and paint slogans on the front wall sometimes. But the danger didna trouble him—so long as it didna threaten me and the bairns.”
“And sometimes even if it does,” I muttered. “And I don’t mean just Fergus. Bloody men.”
Marsali sniffed with amusement.
“Aye. But the thing is—he is a man, no? He’s got to feel he’s worth something. He needs to be able to care for us, and that’s a thing he can do—and do well—here. I canna see how he’d make a decent living in the mountains.”
“True,” I admitted reluctantly. It was a hot day, and stifling in the kitchen, with the cauldron simmering over the hearth. Flies or no flies—and there were an ungodly number of flies in Philadelphia—I got up to open the back door. It wasn’t noticeably cooler outside, though at least the fire under the big washtub hadn’t yet been lit; the girls were still filling it, trudging to and fro from the well with their buckets.
Henri-Christian was nowhere in sight, but had presumably been scrubbed; a filthy black cloth lay crumpled on the doorstep. I stooped to pick it up and saw a folded bit of paper lying on the ground beside the step. It had no direction on it but looked purposeful, so I picked it up and took it back inside.
“Still,” Marsali said, barely waiting for me to sit down. “I’m thinkin’ that even if we canna go to the Ridge, it might be as well if we were to go. There must be places in the South that could use a printer, even if they’re none sae big as Philadelphia.”
“Well, there’s Charleston,” I said doubtfully, “and Savannah. They’re just as hot and ghastly in the summer as Philadelphia is, but the winters are milder, I suppose.”
She shot me a brief look over the shift she was mending, then set it down on her lap, as though having come to a decision.
“It’s no the weather that troubles me,” she said quietly. And, bending, she groped under the pile of shirts and stockings, emerging with a handful of grubby notes and frayed letters. Handling these gingerly, as though they carried some disease, she placed them on my knee.
“Any printer in these days gets such things poked under his door,” she said, watching my face as I read through the first few. “Especially if ye take a stand. We didn’t, for as long as we could, but after a time, ye just canna stand in the middle o’ the road any longer.”
This was said with a simplicity and acceptance that brought tears to my eyes. The more so with the content of the anonymous notes—for they were all unsigned and in a variety of hands, though some were plainly written by the same person—making it quite clear what the price of standing on the Rebel side might be.
“It was worse, maybe,” she said, taking them back and stacking them tidily, “when the British were here. I thought it might stop when they left, but it didn’t.”
“I don’t imagine all the Loyalists left with them,” I said, taking a deep breath in order to control myself. I felt as though I’d been punched in the stomach.
“Only the richer ones,” Marsali said cynically. “The ones who thought they’d be dragged from their homes or beaten and robbed, without the army to protect them. But it doesna mean the poorer ones dinna have the same opinions.”
“Why do you keep these?” I asked, handing them back with two fingers, as though holding them with tongs. “I think I’d throw them into the fire at once.”
“I did, at first,” she said, tucking the handful of nastiness carefully back into the bottom of the basket. “But I found I couldna forget what they’d said, and the words would come back to me at night and stop me sleeping.” She straightened, shrugged, and took up her needle again.
“I told Fergus, and he said the thing to do was to keep them and read them through several times a day, one after the other. Read them tae each other.” A brief, rueful smile touched her mouth. “So we did, after the bairns were asleep—we’d sit by the fire and take turns reading them. And he’d make fun o’ them, criticizing the grammar and the lack o’ poetry, comparing them one to another, and we’d rank them from best to worst . . . and then we’d put them away and go to sleep in each other’s arms.”
Her hand rested gently on the mound of mending, as though it were Fergus’s shoulder, and I smiled.
“Well,” I said, and, clearing my throat, produced the note I’d picked up on the step. “I have no idea whether this is another one for your collection—but I found it on the back step just now.”
She took it with a raised brow and looked it over, turning it to and fro.
“It’s cleaner than most,” she observed. “A decent rag paper, too. It’s maybe just a . . .” Her voice died away as she opened it and began to read. I could see that the writing inside was brief; within seconds, the blood drained from her face.
“Marsali.” I reached toward her, and she thrust the note into my hand and rose swiftly.
Ladybird, ladybird, the note read, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children are gone.
“Henri-Christian!” Marsali’s voice was strong and urgent. “Girls! Where’s your wee brother?”