SH03_Sparrowhawk: Caxton Page 10

  When they were still boys, Jack, who hated ignorance, took it upon himself to teach Proudlocks how to read, write, cipher, and speak English. Proudlocks, who hated his ignorance of the white men of whom he stood in awe, was a diligent pupil. One day, after a lesson in simple mathematics, Jack asked him why he had surrendered to their benefactor.

  Proudlocks did not answer immediately. It was only hours later, after they had both finished their chores and sat together, in the late afternoon, in the room used by the resident tutor to school the Massie children, that he spoke.

  “You people,” he began, as though no time had passed, “you people, you see things we do not. We Oneidas, and Mohawks, and Senecas, all the tribes, we…look at ground only and today only all our lives. You people, you look at sky and beyond and tomorrow.” He paused. “We always had wind, and wood, and water, but no Iroquois ever built boat to sail beyond edge of earth.” The boy paused again, not certain that his words expressed what he wanted to say. “You people, there is some magic about you…but it is not magic. I feel it is good magic, do not fear it. It explains much about you, but I cannot explain it. It brought you here over the water, and spelled death for all old ways…the looking-at-ground ways. This is why Iroquois and other nations fear you, hate you, make war. You people…you are like shamans who despise worshippers and believers and their chants and foolish ceremonies, sweep to side old ways and people with feeble arms and hands in lazy little heads, and claim earth as no Iroquois could, not shaman or warrior or chief, and make it your servant. You are men like us, like the Iroquois. You are born, you live, you die. But there is some magic about you. I wish to learn this magic of yours, so it is magic no more, and then I look at sky and beyond and tomorrow.”

  But you do now, Jack said with a wordless smile to the expectant, bronze-hued face. He was answered a moment later by Proudlocks’s own smile, one of self-knowledge heavy with the quiet, contented dignity that accompanies such a smile.

  Jack could only imagine the hell that John Proudlocks had endured, before wandering into John Massie’s militia camp, to cling to that vision of himself and of the possible, living among people indifferent to their own ignorance and hostile to anything that demanded abandonment of it and all the rituals, customs, and brutality that symbolized that ignorance. In terms of Jack’s own moral endurance, in terms of physical hardship and the concerted efforts to degrade him, the hell that Proudlocks had endured made his own trials seem petty and mundane by comparison, without diminishing their importance or his own self-respect. An ineluctable sense of justice moved him to grant Proudlocks a species of esteem he had once reserved for Augustus Skelly and Redmagne. Proudlocks sensed this special regard, and reciprocated in his own unobtrusive way.

  Jack remembered that day well, for something that Proudlocks had said inspired him to take the boy to his room and show him a gift that Captain Ramshaw had given him on one of his visits to Morland. It was a pair of Italian-made mariner’s pocket globes, tucked securely inside a sturdy oak box. One was celestial, the other terrestrial. They were of painted marble, with intricate images, letters, and numbers cut into the stone. Jack pointed out the oceans, Virginia, England, and France. “There are no edges on the earth,” he said. “Only horizons.” Then he told Proudlocks to hold out his palms, and dropped the globes into them. “There,” he said. “Now you hold the sky in one hand, and the earth in the other. Like the ship captain who uses them, you can go anywhere, and by studying them, can know where you have been, where you are, and where you are going. All your yesterdays and tomorrows.” He paused. “No more looking-at-ground and today only.”

  Proudlocks’s eyes were ablaze with fascination and comprehension. Glancing from one globe to another, he grinned fiercely. “Knowledge not magic,” he said. “Put on paper, in books, written in smooth, cold stone. In numbers, in words. And pictures.” He paused. “Pictures made from numbers and words here.” He looked up at Jack. “Earth this form? Round? No Englishman saw Virginia from sky, and made picture?”

  Jack shook his head. “Nor England,” he said. “Nor any of the continents.”

  Proudlocks looked doubtful. “Sky not round?” he asked, hefting the celestial globe.

  “No. The earth sits in the sky, and travels around the sun. The stars on the globe represent what we can see from down here, on the earth. If the stars on the stone match what he sees in the night sky, a captain can know his position — provided he calculates his latitude and longitude, or his numbers.”

  Proudlocks balanced both globes. “Understand. Knowledge not magic.” He brought up the terrestrial globe and tapped his forehead with it. “Knowledge find home here. Must fill head. Secrets not secrets. Open to any man with busy hands in mind.”

  It occurred to Jack only later that night, as he tossed for a time in his bed, that he must have looked much like Proudlocks that day, when Parson Parmley showed him the maps so long ago. He smiled at the benign irony of it. He wondered if the parson had derived the same pleasure as he had, from seeing a mind awaken to a larger universe, without and within.

  But knowledge of the world was only one element of what Proudlocks had deemed “magic.” Another element was missing, one taken for granted by both of them. He agreed with Proudlocks that his “magic” explained much, but he, too, was unable to identify and explain the unnamed element. It was knowledge, too — but of what?

  * * *

  It was midmorning by the time Jack neared Proudlocks’s shack on the edge of a field. The fowl and swine were kept here in special pens, while the cattle were allowed to roam free in fenced-off pastures beyond the crop fields. Under Proudlocks’s care, the guinea hens, muscovy ducks, turkeys and chickens had increased in numbers to the point that Morland could sell the birds to other freeholds and to the taverns and still have plenty left over for its own tables. The guinea hens and turkeys were let loose in the tobacco fields during the growing season to combat the hornworms that could infest the leaves and eat their way to the stalks. “The birds are more efficient than men for worming and grubbing,” said Proudlocks once. “Men look under each leaf, hoping not to find something to pluck and crush. My hens and turkeys are hungry, and hope to find a meal under each leaf. It is only the top leaves they cannot reach. We should order some ostriches from London.”

  Proudlocks was a vociferous reader now, regularly borrowing books from the Morland library with titles that ranged from history to science to agricultural treatises. Jack often thought that his friend was more widely read than he.

  He found Proudlocks in one of the pens, in the midst of scores of birds, pouring water into their troughs. The bronze face looked up. “Greetings, Jack,” he said. He was the only person at Morland who addressed Jack Frake by his first name.

  “Greetings, John,” Jack said.

  Proudlocks put down his pail and came to the fence. “You returned early from the ball. I heard you pass by this morning.”

  “Yes. I stopped at Mr. Reisdale’s for a while.”

  “I saw the fireworks. Watched them from the roof of the coop.” Proudlocks laughed. “And, I caught the fox.”

  “The one that carried off your prize guinea two nights ago?”

  “That one. He was not expecting me to be out and waiting in so black a night.”

  Jack smiled. “Good. Moses and Henry are going into the woods in the afternoon to pick out wood for more grain hogsheads. Would you go with them to cut it and haul it back?” Moses Topham was Morland’s carpenter, Henry Dakin its cooper.

  “Yes.” Proudlocks frowned. “Heard one of Swart’s people ran away last night.”

  “Who?”

  “Champion.”

  Champion Smith was Brougham Hall’s master blacksmith — and a slave. “How did you hear?” Jack asked.

  “Bristol crossed over to see his wife and daughter at Mr. Otway’s place.” Bristol, another slave, was the blacksmith’s apprentice. “Stopped here to trade news. Said they all heard there was to be a new master. Also, Champion got i
nto a fight with the others. Bristol didn’t say about what.”

  Jack grimaced. “Swart will advertise for him when he returns — if he returns — and offer two or three pounds reward, which he won’t need to pay. The gentleman who is buying Brougham Hall this morning will pay it, if Champion is caught and returned.”

  “He carries no pass,” remarked Proudlocks. “It is true, then?”

  Jack nodded. “I spoke with Mr. Kenrick last night. But, I don’t think Swart’s people need fear him.”

  They talked about what else needed to be done on the plantation to prepare for the coming winter. “I’ll be joining Henry and Moses in the woods. Have supper with me tonight. Miss Beck is preparing one of her potpies that you like so much, and plum pudding. Then we could have a game of chess.”

  Proudlocks agreed, and Jack rode off to see the other tenants about the day’s chores.

  Chapter 7: The Empty Houses (ii)

  In February of 1759, Handel died, and was interred in Westminster Abbey. William Pitt the “Younger” was born in May. In Bohemia, Haydn completed his first symphony. In Salzburg, Austria, Leopold Mozart was preparing his three-year-old son, Wolfgang, for a tour of the courts of Europe the next year. An English dilettante undertook to translate French physiocrat François Quesnay’s Tableau Économique, published the year before; it was the first attempt to analyze an entire economy.

  In Geneva, his latest residence-in-exile, Voltaire completed Candide, and broke with Rousseau over the latter’s public attack on an article by Jean d’Alembert in the Encyclopédie that extolled the theater, which was banned in Geneva. In Rome, Pope Clement XIII put the Encyclopédie on the Index of prohibited books and decreed that all Catholics who did not have their copies of it burned by a priest ran the risk of excommunication. The French government, bowing to pressure from the clergy and conservatives in all strata of society, revoked the Encyclopédie’s printing license, but retained the services of its director of book production, Chrétien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, who found a loophole in the law and arranged to have the great work published in Paris under a Swiss imprint. He also alerted Denis Diderot to planned raids by the authorities, and found places to hide new pages of the Encyclopédie until the danger passed, often in the basement of his own house.

  Samuel Johnson published that year Rasselas, or the Prince of Abissinia, his first major work since completing the Dictionary. David Garrick produced at Drury Lane his Harlequin’s Invasion, a patriotic stage piece about a foiled French invasion of England, for which William Boyce composed the score for “Hearts of Oak.”

  Adam Smith, dean of faculty at the University of Glasgow, published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the subject of which was heavily influenced by David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. A copy of the latter work was confiscated from Smith years before when he was a Snell scholar at Balliol College at Oxford; it had been deemed heretical and atheistic. Hume, now a close friend of Smith’s, was busy publishing the quartos of his History of England, a work which Thomas Jefferson decades later would fault for being partial to royal tyranny. Among Smith’s other Glasgow friends were Joseph Black, a professor of anatomy who discovered carbon dioxide and latent heat; young James Watt, who would patent the first highpressure steam engine; and many merchants and entrepreneurs from whose congenial contact Smith would be partly inspired to begin taking notes for what would become The Wealth of Nations. And Benjamin Franklin, in London representing the Pennsylvania legislature, was collaborating on a book that would urge Britain to expel the French from North America by annexing Canada, arguing that an unrestrained, growing colonial population would be a boon to British manufactures. Franklin’s book was an early critique of the dominant mercantilist theory of trade, whose premise of static wealth was a major contributing factor to most of the century’s wars.

  Frederick the Great, who six years earlier had broken with Voltaire, suffered one of his bitterest defeats at the hands of the Austrians and Russians at Kunersdorf, near Frankfurt. So distraught was the warrior king by the rout, that he deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire, begging fruitlessly of every bullet that flew his way to strike him down. He was ungently removed from the field by his loyal subordinates.

  That same August, at Minden, near Hanover, field marshal Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick and an ally of Frederick, with a smaller army nearly destroyed the French army that threatened to capture George the Second’s principality — nearly, but for the funk of Lord George Sackville, British commander of a cavalry detachment, who repeatedly ignored Ferdinand’s orders to rout the fleeing French cavalry. For this impudent conduct, described by a fellow officer as “frightened trauma,” a delicate euphemism for cowardice, Sackville was court-martialed and cashiered in disgrace from the British army. A witness to his “trauma” was an aide-decamp on Ferdinand’s staff, Lord Charles Brome, a 21-year-old officer of the Grenadier Guards, who later became the second Earl Cornwallis. Sackville, after sedulously inveigling his way back into politics, was some fifteen years later, as Lord Germain, appointed by Frederick Lord North to be Secretary of State for the Colonies, in which capacity he would deal firmly with his enemies from afar.

  And John Harrison, a clockmaker and a commoner, in this year completed the construction of his fourth marine chronometer. The scheduled sea trials of the third were delayed by a combination of the war and the meddling interference of envious royally appointed astronomers.

  * * *

  Hugh Kenrick had also observed Halley’s Comet.

  But while Jack Frake wondered half-seriously whether it was a harbinger or an omen of the future, to Hugh, studying the bright streak in the night sky through the smoke of Philadelphia’s chimneys, it was a salutary punctuation mark for his past.

  It marked his decision to remain in America for a few more years. Two events influenced his decision: the worsening of relations between his father and uncle to the point that his seniors now rarely spoke to each other; and Reverdy Brune’s engagement and marriage to Alex McDougal.

  It began with a letter from his friend, Roger Tallmadge, who reported that his older brother Francis was killed at Hastenbeck. Seconded from the Duke of Cumberland’s Own Regiment of Horse to serve as a courier on the Duke’s staff during the campaign to protect Hanover, Francis, carrying orders from the Duke to his Hanoverian allies during the heaviest fighting, rode into the path of an errant French cannon ball and was picked neatly and fatally from his galloping horse. Stung by the humiliating and unnecessary capitulation of Cumberland and his brother’s seemingly wasted death, Roger persuaded his equally bitter father to try and purchase him a commission in the same regiment. This proved impossible. Roger ended up as an ensign in the Grenadier Guards.

  In the course of his correspondence, Roger alluded both to the feuding between Hugh’s father and uncle, and to the frequent exchanges of visits between the Brunes and the McDougals. He did not feel it his place to speculate or give Hugh details. His careful allusions were discreetly worded warnings.

  The details were supplied in gently couched missives from Hugh’s parents and from Reverdy herself. The widening rift between his father and uncle unfolded as slowly and inexorably as did his loss of Reverdy.

  “Your uncle and I do not much speak to each other, except on unavoidable business,” wrote his father during Hugh’s first year in Philadelphia. “Our servants are kept trim and busy in the carrying of notes between Milgram House and your uncle. Often they pass each other on the road. By the bye, I have decided not to erect a new place for us. It could be done, for our interests in the Portland quarries would give us an advantage. But Milgram House, your mother and I have concluded, will do until such time as we can return to the seat of Danvers.”

  Months later, Garnet Kenrick wrote his son: “Your uncle Basil had some guests down from London last week, among them that fulsome fellow we encountered some years ago, Sir Henoch Pannell, who was accompanied by his fribblous creature of a wife, Chloe. Sir Henoch, I have heard it
said, now controls a bloc of votes in the Commons, and he and your uncle seem to be forging some kind of unholy alliance. I do not worry about the longevity of such a pact; devils prefer to work alone, and one can only surmise that two such objectionable persons would not long be able to tolerate each other. I was obliged to sell to Sir Henoch a small number of shares in the bank, in exchange for his silence on your last London escapade. Your uncle arranged this, having fixed in his noodle the possibility that if His Majesty heard of it, his legal counselors could find a way to annul our patent on Danvers.”

  Effney Kenrick wrote her son: “Mrs. Tallmadge reports to me that the Brunes have been receiving the McDougals with ‘suspicious frequency.’ We had the Brunes over to Milgram for a Michaelmas supper once after your departure, but they have since begged to excuse themselves from our subsequent invitations in every instance, pleading prior social commitments, or illness.”

  Reverdy wrote Hugh: “Thank you for the description of Philadelphia and of the quaint environs in which you have been ensconced. It sounds like lovely but rude country. Is it true what I have read here, that the Quaker women there must go about in public with veils over their faces, and that the authorities there allow Indians to roast Presbyterian captives alive in the square and say prayers of thanks after their repast?”

  The undertone of flippancy eluded letter-hungry Hugh, who was usually sensitive to literary turns and twists. He said in an amusing but instructive letter: