Chapter 38

"Did you hear the news?" Mr. Maguire asked when Anne brought in her copies of legal documents the next Saturday.

"Not likely," she said with a smile. "I've only, let's say communed; yes, that's a fine word, communed with my tobacco plants and a few crows this week. I'm getting calluses. The crows seem amused." She held up her hands. "They are weak on conversation although they do talk to each other constantly."

"It's about Alexander Martin. I understand you met him." He raised an eyebrow and grinned. "In fact I think the whole town knows you met him. They say he's gone north in a fit of Tory patriotism to join Chalmer's legion."

"Really? Didn't think he was the type. Good riddance."

"Your doing, I think. He could no longer walk these streets without hearing sniggers or rough jests."

"My-my, poor boy." She tried not to laugh and failed, turning aside.

Maguire laughed with her. "Indeed. Been a lot of desertions according to one man who came back sick. As for Alex, even those he gambled with refused to sit at a table with him. I fear he was ostracized, lass, thrown out into the gnashing of teeth by a wild, carrot-topped female, so they say. Merciless woman I've been told."

"Couldn't happen to a finer fellow. And I am no longer offended by the word Tory, sir. I do not wish to be in the same company as that braggart and coward or any of his ilk." She stopped, frowned and sighed, never having put such thoughts into words.

"Aye, I surely agree. Welcome to the revolt. You're a bit late. The fine lad you are planning to gaff is over at the courthouse talking to the old judge about entails I believe, perhaps codicils and liens as well."

"Will he make a good lawyer?" Anne shook her head and got her mind back on the present, handed over her copies and received more work in return, carefully filling her folder and holding her shillings. "And I'm not a rebel either, sir, not yet. Is there room in the middle?"

"That's doubtful. In time, in time you'll come around. As for Philip, he's got the head for it, the law I mean. Now go over and rescue him. The old judge tends to ramble."

Indeed Philip was glad to see her, and the balding judge waved him away. He tried for a kiss and she ducked.

"Not in public. How'd you do in there? Did he stump you?"

Philip chuckled. "Not really, when I fumbled, he filled in the spaces. It was painless. May be done by mid-August and admitted to the bar almost at once. Torts is all I have left."

She hugged him. "Wonderful. And I suppose you heard about the Martin boy." She made a tisking sound. "Poor young fellow."

He nodded and squinted at her. "They say you had a hand in that, or a whip perhaps."

She looked up and him and blinked her eyes. "Who, me? You know I don't own a whip."

On her way home, Anne stopped by the factor's store to buy some powdered bug killer, and Mr. McMillan had an envelope for her, addressed in a hand she did not know in care of her late father in Annapolis.

Sitting in her one-horse shay with the reins in her lap, face shaded by her wide-brimmed straw hat, she tore open the stained sheet of paper and found an unfinished note from Billy Fields. At the bottom someone had scribbled in pencil, "Billy died May 8, burnt they think, like the others. He was a good man. Buried with seven others." She held the paper to her chest, closed her eyes and grunted, felt as if she had been struck, and then sighed, shivering.

Billy's terse and unfinished letter, only a few lines, said that he was sick with what he called "the clap." He wrote that Sue had evidently infected all but one of the men in his hut and then she and her child and mother had "scampered." His letter ended. "I should be coming home as soon as I am well enough to travel, that is if this mercury potion will do the trick. Hope you are well and..." It ended there with a smear of ink. She knew what "burnt" meant.

Anne clenched her jaw, took another deep breath and then leaned back and smiled, closing her eyes. Her old life along with her happy youth was finished, done with, sunk, foundered, scuttled. Gone. She could not pick a word for it. Found "chimera" and rejected it. Her first love was dead and buried.

She was no longer a good man's ever-faithful Tory daughter, and she was aware that her inbred loyalty to George III was eroding rapidly, being chipped away by the times, by hatred and by evil men. She was a woman, a free woman with a will of her own, a home of her own. I can be a rebel if I want, anything I want. God bless Billy, he has freed me from the past. Drowned it. Wiped the slate clean.

She felt a tear on her cheek and a sour lump in her throat. That life, she was sure, that bright and carefree world had vanished, never to return. She crushed his letter in her hand and choked back her tears. Later, later.