The Rebellion of Jane Clarke Read Online Free PDF

some sort of ail, or whatever it is you claim in such cases. At the same time I shall write and explain that on reflection a fall wedding would better suit our circumstance. You see how I bend to your whim in this? You see how I am not the kind of father who would ride roughshod over a daughter’s concerns? By the fall you might know all you wish to know of the man. By fall you might know all you wish to know of an entire king’s regiment. By fall you might have been to another wedding and seen what poor choice remains. Now, we are clear, are we not? Go to your bed, Jane.”
    Jane climbed the stairs. At the top she found Bethiah hovering on the landing, attempting to catch the voices below. “Must you take him?” she asked.
    Jane said, “Go to your bed, Bethiah.”
    THE NEXT MORNING AFTER his breakfast Jane’s father addressed her again. “I’m off to Nobscusset to see the cooper. I shall expect to see your letter on that table when I return.”
    Once Jane’s father had gone, Jane rose to help Mehitable clear away the dishes, but her stepmother took the plates from her hand. “You’d best get after that letter.”
    Jane released the plates, but as she did so she took a new, secretive look at her stepmother. Mehitable was a tall, high-colored, well-set woman who might have held her head up in any man’s home; instead she spent all her time looking down at a babe, a sleeve, or, as now, a dirty bowl. How was it she had come to marry Jane’s father? Jane wondered. Had Mehitable's father fixed on Nathan Clarke the way Jane’s father had fixed on Phinnie Paine? Look up, Jane thought. Look at me. Tell me what you know. Indeed, Mehitable did look up, but only when Bethiah came banging through the door with the milk pail. “Bethiah, take some of that milk to my mother,” she said. “She misses her cow.”
    Jane said, “I’ll go.”
    SHORTLY AFTER MEHITABLE’S MARRIAGE to Jane’s father, Mehitable’s father drowned. For three years afterward, for reasons that had been half whispered and half spoken aloud, Jane’s father and Mehitable’s mother had been estranged. A year later the widow had married a lawyer named Eben Freeman, who had boarded with her for some time, a dwelling arrangement that had inspired some but not all of the whispering. Soon after the marriage Freeman had been elected to serve in the legislature, and the couple had gone to stay at Boston while he served out his term. Jane’s father had advised Freeman to sell or let the house in Satucket, but Jane’s grandmother had argued against it, believing they would return to Satucket to live between sittings of the legislature. In the space of three years, however, Freeman had managed to free himself for only a handful of brief visits home; a lengthy stay had been promised for that spring as soon as the weather cleared; Jane’s grandmother had waited through April, May, and into June, but when her husband was forced again to postpone, she had departed for Satucket alone. The situation between the families being such as it was, Jane couldn’t have said she knew her grandmother well; indeed, half of what she knew came from rumor and the other half from her father’s complaints of what he called his mother-in-law’s licentious opinions.
    Jane’s grandparents lived in a neat, tight house of one and a half stories situated about halfway along the landing road. The early June weather was the weather that Jane liked best out of all the Satucket year—the air was neither hot nor cold, blue had just won out over gray above, the spring mud had dried out below, and on either side of the road new leaves shone whole and clean and bright, not yet dulled by dust or riddled by insects. Jane took the walk slowly and felt the smoke clearing from her lungs as she went; as if sharing the thought, Jane found her grandmother out in her garden instead of indoors.
    The past year had widened the frame of silver around her grandmother’s face, but the straight back,