Part 8

With a great effort Kitty drew the stays together at the bottom, clamping her cousin’s slim hips and belly into a frighteningly narrow space. The garment had been designed for a much taller girl, and came well down over the thigh, almost to the knee. It fastened at the bottom with a tiny jeweled padlock, and Kitty noted a similar one at the top. She hesitated.

“Does this unlock with a key?” she asked.

Sally Rose held up a tiny bit of gold on a satin ribbon. “Oh, it does, Kitty, and I have the key here. Isn’t it all deliciously clever?”

“I don’t know,” muttered Kitty. “Hold your stomach in.”

Sally Rose compressed herself to the utmost and closed her eyes. Kitty fastened the padlock and struggled with the lacings.

“Tighter! Tighter!” gasped Sally Rose.

Kitty pulled at the strong cord until it almost cut her fingers. It was waxed, and it had a toughness about it that made her think of wire.

After a moment she shoved Sally Rose up against the wall, sat down in a chair in front of her, braced her knees, and laboriously threaded and pulled till the task was over and she could snap the jeweled padlock at the top. Then she stood off to view her work.

Sally Rose looked like a long white worm standing up on its tail--or like a white candle, if you wanted to be poetic--but more like a worm. Her face was flushed, and she could take only the shortest, shallowest breaths, but there was triumph in her eye.

“Now my dress and petticoat, Kitty, if you’ll be so good. Oh wait till Gerry sees me! He’ll be so o’ercome with admiration he’ll scarce know what to say!”

“He’ll be o’ercome, I don’t doubt,” said Kitty. “Especially if he tries to put his arm around you. You feel like a stick of cord wood.” She fastened the gauze petticoat over the stays and then brought the sky-blue muslin gown Sally Rose had laid out on a chair.

Was life going to be like this always, she wondered somewhat wistfully; helping Sally Rose to dress, letting Sally Rose in when the evening was over; herself never dressing up, never meeting anyone, never going anywhere? She wished that Tom Trask the logger had the daring British Gerry had. Gossip said that the New Hampshire men were in camp in Medford, and Medford wasn’t much farther than Boston. But he had no way of knowing she was so near him, of course. Perhaps when things got quieter after Concord Fight, he’d gone back to Newburyport to return her father’s gun. But now it seemed that battles were threatening again. Perhaps--

“Now my gold gauze kerchief and my scent bottle,” panted Sally Rose.

Kitty brought them. “Are you ready now?” she asked, trying to keep the envy from her tone. It wasn’t Sally Rose’s fault that she felt lonely and neglected, not Sally Rose’s fault at all.

“Yes, I’m ready,” sighed Sally Rose. “I’ll go down the back stairs, I think, and through the garden. Good-by, dear.” She held up her soft cheek.

Kitty brushed her lips against it. “Good-by, Sally Rose,” she said. “Don’t get into any trouble, and come home soon.”

Sally Rose laughed a little uneasily and made an awkward motion to step forward. But she did not step forward. She stopped suddenly, twisted her body, or tried to, and put her hand to her side.

“My, a bone jabbed me,” she said.

After a moment she tried again to move forward. This time she succeeded in taking three little hobbled steps. Then she swayed clumsily, tripped, and fell on the rag rug. There she lay like an overset turtle, unable to rise.

Kitty stuffed her handkerchief into her mouth to choke back her laughter. Then she ran forward and struggled to hoist Sally Rose to her feet.

“I--I don’t think I can walk in this thing,” gasped Sally Rose. “It’s like having two feet in one breeches leg. And the bones hurt me. And it’s getting late. Take it off, Kit. Take it off at once. Here’s the key.”

Still trying to keep back her laughter at the other girl’s ridiculous plight, Kitty pulled off the blue dress and the petticoat and fitted the tiny key into the jeweled lock. It refused to turn, and she twisted it gently.

“You’ll be in a pickle,” she muttered, “if it should break.”

“Don’t you dare break it!” squealed Sally Rose.

Kitty worked the key this way and that. Below in the tavern kitchen Gran’s voice lifted up the words of an old hymn. Through the open window drifted the scent of garden flowers in the warm dark. Her hands got sticky with sweat. She kept dropping the wretched little key.

“Hurry!” pleaded Sally Rose. “I’m afraid he’ll come and not find me. I’m afraid he’ll go away.”

Desperately Kitty twisted the bit of metal.

“It’s no use, Sally Rose,” she said at last. “I can’t make it work. What will we do?”

“Cut the lacings, I suppose,” sighed Sally Rose, “and I’ll try to wiggle out through the gap in the middle. I don’t care much. I never should have bought it. Maybe the staymaker will take it back. Get my shears. They’re in the workbox in the top drawer.”

“But you left your workbox in the kitchen,” said Kit. “I saw it there when we were scouring the pots after supper. All the other shears and knives are there too, and if I went down, I’d have to explain to Gran.”

The two girls looked at each other in dismay. Sally Rose bit her lip. “Yes, you would,” she said. “And whatever excuse you made, she might come back upstairs with you, and then I’d never get away. Can’t you break the lacings?”

“I doubt it,” said Kitty. “It’s the toughest cord I ever saw.”

“Try.”

So Kitty yanked and tugged and twisted, but the cord refused to break. Sally Rose was hopelessly trapped.

They were silent for a moment. Then she clenched her soft hands and stiffened her mouth. “I’ll have to go just as I am,” she said, and tried to walk again. Again she fell.

Kitty helped her up and led her to a chair. “Sit down, Sally Rose,” she said gently. But Sally Rose could not sit down.

“I guess it’s no use,” she murmured, reluctant, almost tearful. “You’ll just have to go and tell Gerry I’m sick, or something. Tell him to come back tomorrow night. I’ll surely be there.”

Kitty hesitated. She didn’t know quite why. Was it because Gerry was British and she disapproved of the British? Or was it a deeper, stranger thing--a sort of foreboding? A fear, and yet an eagerness, too.

“Are you sure you want me to, Sally Rose?” she asked.

Sally Rose stamped her foot, or tried to, then writhed as a whalebone jabbed her. “Of course I do,” she cried. “Go quickly, do, and come back and tell me what he has to say. Then we’ll have to get the shears and cut me out of this thing. Oh Kitty, go now!”

And so it was that Kitty Greenleaf slipped away to Charlestown’s old graveyard that night to meet her country’s enemy, her cousin’s exciting young man.

* * * * *

An eerie little wind was blowing through the town that night, a warm wind, and it had the tang of sea salt in it, and the heavy sweetness of the new mown hay on Bunker Hill. It ruffled Kitty’s hair and cooled her hot face as she walked through the empty streets, past the Two Cranes, the courthouse, and the meeting house with its tall white spire rising against the dark. Few of the windows were lighted, but down by the docks she could hear the familiar cry of the watch, and over the bay the lights of Boston shone out bright and clear. It was hard for her to remember that Boston was no longer a friendly town.

When she reached the graveyard she felt her way along the low wall that protected it from the street. Shadow lay thick about the grassy mounds inside, and crooked elm boughs meeting overhead shut out the thin glow of the starlight. There was no moon.

Leaving the wall she blundered forward, now and then brushing against one of the old headstones. She knew what they looked like well enough: short thick slabs of greenish slate with a death’s head at the top; some of reddish sandstone; beyond them the granite tombs where the great families lay. But she could not seem to find the path that would lead her through. And then, somehow she did find it, and groped her way to the wall on the far side with the open fields beyond. He was standing there, just as she knew he would be.

He carried a dark lantern, half open now to let a little light shine through, and he wore the rough shirt and breeches of an American farmer. Sally Rose would have been disappointed had she hoped to see the scarlet coat. As he heard her footstep on the worn grass he drew in his breath sharply.

“Ah, Sally Rose!” he whispered, and turned the lantern full upon her.

“I--I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I’m her cousin Kitty. She sent me to tell you--”

And then suddenly, to her own horror, in spite of the awe she felt for this handsome young stranger from the enemy camp, in spite of the need to keep this tryst in silence and secrecy, she began to giggle. She couldn’t help it when she thought of Sally Rose trapped in the stays; of her pretty, angry face on top of the body of a pinched white worm. She put both hands to her mouth and rocked and rocked with stifled mirth.

Then she realized that he was shaking her. “Stop it, Kitty, if that’s your name,” he said. His voice was firm but not unkind. “Where’s Sally Rose? Tell me what you are laughing at? I want to laugh, too.”

He had put the lantern down and was holding her by both shoulders. She could not see his face, and yet she knew what he looked like. She would always remember him, she thought, from that day when he marched past the Bay and Beagle and she was standing at the door. Suddenly she found herself telling him all about the stays and Sally Rose.

He kept very quiet until she had finished, but then he did not laugh as she had expected him to do. When he spoke again, his voice had an impatient sound.

“I’ve often heard the men in barracks say--the married men, that is--that women have no sense at all. And I guess they be right. I’m sorry Sally Rose did such a foolish thing. I--I wanted--tonight it really mattered that I should see her.”

“But she will be here tomorrow night, sir,” answered Kitty, not quite sure how one addressed a British officer who pretended not to be a British officer. “It will be such a little time till then.”

“A little time,” he muttered, “but much may happen in it. I may be here tomorrow night--but I trust she will not be.”

“What do you mean?” faltered Kitty.

A bough rustled a few yards off, and he flashed his lantern that way and listened. After a moment he spoke again in a lower tone.

“How does it happen you womenfolk are still in Charlestown? I understood that it had been evacuated.”

“Oh, it has been--nearly. But Granny says she will not abandon my uncle’s property here until she must. She says she will stay and try to keep it intact for him, if she can.”

“It’s been known since April that we might burn the town any day.”

“I know. But time goes on, and you do not do it, and we grow less afraid. And all the while our Army is growing larger and more strong.”

“So is ours,” he retorted. “Three new generals arrived from England; martial law proclaimed in Boston yesterday. General Gage denounced you for rebels and traitors. If you don’t disband and go your ways in peace soon, we’re coming out to make you go.”

“Then I suppose there will be a battle,” sighed Kitty. “I’ll never know why it is men can’t settle a squabble without trying to kill each other.”

Again he flashed the lantern on her face and held it there a moment. Then he spoke to her from out of the dark, and his voice had a different sound.

“You know--Kitty--I don’t think I understand it either. I never really wanted to be a soldier.”

“A captain,” she corrected him. “A captain in the Twenty-third.”

“Ah yes, a captain. I can hear the watch coming down the street, and we cannot leave here until he is gone. Sit down on the grass.”

Indeed it was the watch, and she could hear him shouting as he turned the corner by the brick well. “Ten o’ the clock, this thirteenth night o’ June, and the weather fair. Town’s empty, Sons o’ Liberty gone to camp, Rogues and Tories to Boston!”

The young Englishman drew her down in the shadow of a flowering quince tree. She sat there straight and proper and he sprawled with careless grace beside her, not alarmingly near.

“No, I never meant to bear arms, and how I came to do it is no matter, but I, too, wish England and America could settle their differences without spilling blood. Do you think I am a coward, Kitty?”

“No,” she said slowly. “I do not think that.”

The voice of the watch grew louder. He must be passing very close by.

“I have cursed the Americans, and yet I am not sure I was right when I did it. I have gone amongst them some, even been kept in gaol by them, and yet I can’t see that they’re any worse fellows than I. I cannot help thinking that I myself might have been an American. Except for a choice a man made some hundred and fifty years ago. The right choice, of course--and yet--”

Kitty felt her blood stir in a different way now. She had been thrilling to his strangeness and his handsomeness, and the excitement of this secret meeting. But now she had the uncanny feel that there were ghosts about. Mighty ghosts, ghosts of countries coming together, here in the dim starlight in the shadow of Bunker Hill.

“You an American? How?”

He settled comfortably in the grass. “Listen, Kitty, I’ll tell you more of myself than I ever told Sally Rose. I do not know why, unless it is because you are less distractingly fair. Alas, I am afraid I like overwell to talk, Kitty.”

“So does everyone, it seems,” murmured Kitty. “But what happened--a hundred and fifty years ago?”

“I like to talk, I suppose, because my mother was a strolling player, and famous for the way she spoke her lines as well as her good looks. She traveled the fairs and market towns, and everywhere she was made welcome and a stage set up for her. My father was a West Country farmer, and a dull husband I think he made her. I cannot recall her too well. But it was through his blood that I might have been born an American.”

The voice of the watch was fading now, down by the tannery and the distilleries, but Gerry Malory kept on talking.

“My father would shake his head, I remember, whenever anyone mentioned America. ’Twas a legend in our family that once an old grandsire of ours, about the time I mention, had journeyed to Plymouth and watched a shipful of people leaving that country to settle in this one. That he thought for a time to go with them, but decided against it. Sometimes I wonder if he had gone--”

The watch was coming back. They saw the light he carried. It wavered to and fro. Then it stopped just at the wall of the graveyard. Gerry Malory sprang hastily to his feet. “Kitty,” he whispered, “go back and tell Sally Rose--I don’t know when I’ll see her--but tell her to get out of Charlestown. We’re getting ready to move against the Americans. I don’t know when. At least by the end of the week. Some say we’re for Dorchester Heights, and some say Bunker Hill. Tell her to be gone. And you go with her--Kitty.”

He vaulted over the low wall and disappeared in the darkness between the fields and the flats along the river. Kitty peered after him, but she saw only a scatter of fireflies and a light mist rising from the earth. She was not afraid of the watch, but he did not challenge her as she crept back to the Bay and Beagle. He did not know she had been keeping a tryst with the enemy. Well, she had been, and felt herself none the worse for it.

She, too, was wondering what would have happened if old Grandsire Malory had taken that ship so many years ago.

_Chapter Eleven_

A GREAT SECRET

“We been long enough getting here,” said Tom Trask, as he dragged the prow of a small rowboat up the shaly beach. “Are you sure this be Charlestown Neck, Johnny?”

Tugging away at the other side of the boat, Johnny Pettengall answered him. “Charlestown, sure enough. Hold on. Give me your hand. I got my foot caught in a patch of eel grass or summ’at like.”

Tom did as he was bidden, and in a moment the two were climbing up a steep bank into the hayfield above. Just to their left loomed a low hill, sharp on its eastern side. A taller, more gently rounded hill stood up behind it, and through the thick, fragrant grass around them a rail fence wound away toward higher ground. Tom could see no lighted windows anywhere.

“You ever been here before?” he asked doubtfully.

“No,” said Johnny, “but I come by here yesterday when I was aboard our sloop that went up to the Penny Ferry to meet the supply carts from the eastward. I had it pointed out to me. This is Breed’s Hill just ahead of us, and Bunker Hill’s behind.”

“Charlestown’s said to be a village,” Tom continued to object. “I can see orchards, and what looks like a brick kiln over there, and by the smell there’s clay pits somewhere about. But I don’t see any houses at all.”

“Town’s the other side of the hill,” Johnny reassured him. “Come on. We got to get to the Bay and Beagle before Ma’am Greenleaf locks up for the night.”

Uncertain and on his guard, Tom followed his companion up the slope through the firefly-studded grass. More than a week now, he and the Newburyport lad had been sleeping at night with their feet toward the same campfire--when they did sleep--sharing the same ration of salt pork and corn meal. He had not gone back to Medford after they burned the _Diana_, for he and Johnny kept telling themselves that they would borrow a boat and row over to Charlestown to see the girls, but not until tonight had they been able to get away. They had not wasted their time, though. They had gone with the raiding parties that constantly scoured the islands all the way from Chelsea Neck to the deep sea. They had helped to burn Tory barns and steal Tory cattle. Tom felt he could give a good account of himself when he got back to his own company, but he was not so sure Captain Moore would consider it a good account. He was even more dubious about the attitude of the Colonel, his old friend, Johnny Stark. That they were old friends wouldn’t make any difference at all, when there was business in hand.

Yes, tonight after he’d seen Miss Kitty again and stolen a kiss or two, he thought he’d better make for Medford, with or without young Pettengall. Maybe he’d better ask now just what his companion intended to do.

At that moment they reached the crest of Breed’s Hill and paused to look down.

“Them lights over there must be Boston,” Johnny told him. “You ever been there, Tom? I heard it’s the greatest city in North America. The best anyway.”

“Didn’t know we had any other cities,” said Tom, grinning in the darkness.

Johnny took him seriously. “Course we have,” he hastened to protest. “There’s New York, and Philadelphia where the Great Congress meets. Some others further south, I guess, and all of ’em sending help to Boston. There’s talk they’ll even send their soldiers here.”

“Believe it when I see them,” said Tom skeptically. “But you ask me, and I say no, I never been to Boston. I live a sight of a ways off, you know, up the Merrimack.”

They stood there together a moment in the starlight and cool sea wind, the sweetness of ripe hay.

“I know,” said Johnny. “You didn’t go back there, ever--after we got news of Concord Fight, did you? Ain’t you got some folks waiting for you to come home?”

Tom shrugged. “Folks is all dead,” he told Johnny. “Won’t nobody miss me. Well--maybe a girl or two.”

Then he spoke more quickly and in a lighter tone. “But I know where I will be missed, I bet, and that’s back in Medford. My company was less than half full strength when I left, and I better be getting myself over there. How about you?”

“I ought to be in Cambridge, I guess, with Captain Little’s company.”

“Moses Little? Heard he’d been made a colonel, just like Stark.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t hear.”

They were starting down the hill now, toward a cluster of roofs and gables with a tall spire in the midst of it, toward a shadowy line of wharves along the shore.

“I know sure enough about Johnny. I was there in the tavern when we chose him by a show of hands. They say some voted twice. I know I did. He was my neighbor up in Derryfield. I worked in his sawmill some and went hunting with his son Caleb. Caleb’s a right smart lad.”

It was harder going down Breed’s Hill than going up, for the western side was as steep as the eastern, and they had to hold back. There were stone walls to climb, and the dew-wet grass was hard to wade through, but Tom scarcely noticed that. Funny, he thought, as he heard his tongue run on, how he never had very much to say, unless it was about John Stark.

“Oh, Johnny’s the man for you,” he was saying. “Once when the Indians captured him and put him to hoeing their fields, he cut down the corn and left the weeds standing. When they made him run the gantlet, he whacked them as he went through, instead of t’other way. Kept singing while he ran that he’d kiss all their women. He never liked the British either, after he fought beside them at Quebec. ’Fore I was high as a rail fence, I heard him say we’d have to fight against them sometime. There was folks who laughed at him, but I guess they ain’t laughing now.”

“Here we be,” said Johnny as they came to the beginning of a street that led past the darkened windows of Charlestown. “I got no idea where the place is. Likely there’ll be a horse and a dog on its sign.”

But Charlestown was no very extensive metropolis, and after a little wandering through its dim lanes and uncobbled streets, they found the tavern they were seeking. The door stood open to let in the night breeze, and the two boys stepped uncertainly through.

A few candles burning in iron holders lit the dim taproom. Clean mugs and glasses stood neatly on shelves behind the bar, and the long brown braid of tobacco leaves hanging near it swayed gently in the draft from the open door. Tom thought that the braid looked like a cow’s tail. He made up a face when he remembered the pipeful of tobacco he’d had to smoke the night they burned the _Diana_. Here was one customer of Ma’am Greenleaf’s who wouldn’t ask her to cut off a few inches for him, that was sure. But where was Ma’am Greenleaf? Or Kitty? Or the other girl? The room was empty, so far as he could see.

Johnny, too, was looking around him. “Don’t see where they could have gone to,” he muttered, “and left the door open and the lights burning.”

Just at that moment there came an anguished wail from somewhere overhead.

“Stop it! Oh stop! You’re killing me!”

“Robbers!” gasped Johnny.

“Or them British devils!” cried Tom, looking desperately for the staircase. He finally saw it, winding up from a little alcove that led to the kitchen, and in a flash he and Johnny pounded up the narrow treads, bursting breathlessly into a long hall at the top. From a room on the side toward the river emerged another half-stifled cry.

“In here!” shouted Tom, flinging the door open.

Then he stood quite still. The sight before him was such a one as he had never seen by the falls of Derryfield. Johnny’s astonished gasp told him that his friend was as taken aback as he.

Sally Rose Townsend sat precariously on the edge of a four-poster bed, her face flushed and distorted. Granny Greenleaf stood in front of her, her hands busy about the girl’s dress--except that Sally Rose wore no dress. Her shoulders were bare and gleamed whitely in the candlelight, but her entire body below her shoulders seemed to be shut up in some sort of cage. The cage gapped apart in the middle to show an expanse of some white fabric underneath. It was gripped firmly together at a point just above the girl’s waist, and again below.

“It’s no use, Sally Rose,” Gran was muttering. “I can’t get this foolish contrivance apart, and there isn’t a locksmith left in town. I believe there’s a blacksmith, though. We’ll send Kitty to fetch the blacksmith. Mercy, where is Kitty? I never thought of her before. Where has Kitty gone?”