Chapter One

Tulip Hill — Tuesday, 2 to Thursday, 4 April 1782

Anne took the ledgers off the hall table on the Tuesday morning, a year and two months after she had laid them out.

He came down at seven and found her at it. She had the first six stacked at the foot of the stair already, 1770 to 1775, and was standing at the table with the seventh open in her hands, reading the last page before she shut it, as a woman reads the last page of a letter she has had a long time. The fanlight was full of sun. Outside, beyond the open door, the lawn went down to the river in its terraces with the dew still on it, and somewhere below the second terrace Nathan was hammering at the boathouse in a slow, careful rhythm, a stroke and a wait and a stroke.

“You’ll want help with those,” he said.

“I’ll want you to carry them. I can stack them.” She shut the seventh and laid it on the six. “The commissioners have their list. Mr Kemp copied every line of it, and he copied it fair, and they’ll sell what’s on it at Chestertown when they please. There’s nothing left in these that anybody wants.” She looked down the table at the five that were still lying open. “I put them out so that nobody could say you had anything to hide. Nobody’s said it. Not one man came in all that year to look, except the three in the first month, and one of them only wanted his dinner.”

“It was the right thing to do.”

“It was the only thing I could think of to do.” She picked up the eighth. “That’s not the same, but it’ll serve.”

He came and stood beside her. He had not looked at these books since the morning he read the debts aloud to Kemp. He had kept six years of his life in them, in his own hand and his father’s and William’s and Randolph’s, and he found that he did not want to look at them now, and looked anyway. 1777 lay open at a page of bills on Liverpool in Randolph’s small backward-leaning hand. 1778 was nearly empty. The firm had been broken two years by then. Somebody had gone on entering the interest on what was owed to it, half-yearly, in a column that ran down to the foot of the page and over, and nobody had ever paid a farthing of it, and the hand that had gone on entering it was his own.

“I don’t remember doing that,” he said.

“You did it at Chestertown, the winter before you came here. In the evenings.” Anne did not look at the page. “You’d come in from the warehouse and sit down after supper and bring it up to the day. I used to hear the pen from the stair.”

She shut it. She shut the last four one after another, without reading them, and stacked them, and then she stood back.

The table was bare for the first time since February of the year before. It was a long table, walnut, her mother’s, and it had stood in the hall at Tulip Hill since the house was built. The sun from the fanlight had lain on it every morning for fourteen months. Now that the books were off it, he could see where they had been. The polish had faded all round them to the colour of weak tea, and where each ledger had lain there was a darker oblong, rich and red, the colour the whole table had been once. Twelve of them, in two rows. It looked as if the books were still there, only made of shadow.

Anne looked at it for some time.

“Phillis will want to oil it,” she said. “It won’t come back. Not in my lifetime.” She took up the journal from the end of the table, where it had always lived, the green calf one, and held it against her. “I’ll keep this out. It’s the only one that’s still going.”

“Where do you want them?”

“In the press in your room. On the bottom shelf. Papa says the attic floor won’t bear them and the cellar’s damp.” She almost smiled. “You can sit with them in the mornings, while you do the firewood.”

He had not done the firewood for twenty-two months. He had nothing now of his own, not a field nor a hogshead nor a debt to collect. The firewood was his whole account.

“I’ll not do it,” he said.

“You will,” said Anne, “on Thursday. You always come to it by Thursday.” She put the journal under her arm. “Take them up, James. I want the table.”

He took them up in three journeys, four at a time, and put them on the bottom shelf of the press in the dressing room that faced east, where the linen had been. When he came down the third time she had a cloth and was rubbing at the bare walnut, not oiling it, only rubbing, along the edge of one of the dark oblongs, as if she could make the faded wood match it by working at it. He watched her from the stair. She did not hear him. She worked at it for a long while, very steadily, and then she stopped and looked at the cloth, and folded it, and went away to the kitchen.

Samuel would sit beside him at breakfast now. It had taken three weeks, a cod-line and a great deal of not looking, and it was conditional: he would sit on the bench on his father’s left, so long as his father did not speak to him first, and he would accept bread from his father’s plate, so long as it was handed sideways, without being looked at. Nancy explained the rules. She had worked them out from watching, as she worked out everything, and she told them to her father on the stair on the Sunday before Easter in a low voice, as one person in a house tells another how to manage a horse.

Galloway came down late and sat at the head of the table, in the chair with arms, and said grace in the silence of his old meeting, with his eyes open, and then said “Amen” aloud for the children, who were Church because their father was, and helped himself to ham.

“Watkins’s book’s come up from the Ridge,” he said. “The Lady Day account. It’s late, as it always is. He brings it up the week after Easter because the week before is the plant beds.” He cut his ham. “I’ve not looked at it. I’ve looked at it every quarter for twenty years and it’s always right, and that’s the trouble with it. A man stops seeing what’s always right.”

“You’d like me to go over it.”

“I’d like thee to go to the Ridge and sit with Watkins over it, at his own table, and look at what he’s looking at. Then come back and tell me if it’s right.” Galloway did not look up from his plate. “Thee’s been in my house three weeks. Thee’s been at the boathouse with Nathan and on the shore with me and on the stair with my grandson. A man who’s kept books for twenty years can’t sit on a stair for ever.” He chewed. “Thee wrote something at that table on Lady Day for the whole afternoon, and it wasn’t mine, and it wasn’t the commissioners’. I’d not ask what. But I saw thy face when thee came to the foot of it. It was the first time since thee came home that thee looked as if thee’d been of use.”

Anne, at the other end of the table, went on cutting Francina’s bread into fingers.

“I’ll go this morning,” Cheston said.

“Take the bay. The grey’s lame.” Galloway reached for the mustard. “And James. Watkins keeps the hands’ book. The allowance book. He’ll show it thee if thee asks for it, and not if thee doesn’t. It’s not in the account. I don’t keep one, as thee knows. He does, because he must, for the corn.” He put the mustard down. “I’ll not tell thee to read it. I’ll tell thee it’s there.”

The Ridge was four miles off, by the road that went up from the river between the fields and over the long rise behind the house. The last time he had ridden it was in June of ’eighty, the morning his father’s letter came. He had ridden it then to look at plant beds and been called Mr Justice by a man who could be sold, and had thought about nothing else for the rest of that day.

It was April now, and everything was early. The dogwood was out along the edges of the woods, white. The peach trees in the orchard below the Ridge quarters were in blossom, so thick that from the road they looked like smoke. The plant beds were on the south slope, under their covering of brush, with the seedlings just showing through it, small and very green. Somewhere in the creek below, the herring were running. He could hear the splash of them where the creek came down over the stones by the mill, and see three boys in the water to their knees with dip-nets, and a woman on the bank with a basket.

Watkins was at his own door, a square brick house with a porch, with his hat on, waiting for him. Somebody had ridden on ahead, or somebody had seen the bay come over the rise. On the Ridge, Cheston supposed, somebody always saw.

“Mr Cheston.”

“Mr Watkins. Mr Galloway asks me to sit with you over Lady Day.”

“He said he might.” Watkins was a lean, weathered, careful man of fifty with a bad hip and a wife who kept his porch swept like a deck. He had come up from the Patuxent twenty years before and had run the Ridge for Galloway ever since, and he had never in that time been heard to say one word more than the matter needed. He looked at Cheston’s face with the expression of a man reading the sky over a field he means to cut tomorrow. “Come in, sir. It’s on the table.”

The account was four sheets in Watkins’s slow upright hand, ruled: tobacco, corn, wheat, herring, iron, cloth and shoes, physic, wages. It was right to the penny, and Watkins sat drinking his small beer while the gentleman found that out.

“It’s right,” said Cheston.

“Yes, sir.”

“Mr Galloway said you keep another book. For the corn.”

Watkins put his cup down.

“The allowance book.” He looked at Cheston across the table for a moment. Then he got up, stiffly, because of the hip, and went to the corner cupboard and took down from the top shelf a thick book bound in rough calf, much handled, with a strap round it and the corners worn through to the board. He laid it on the table and undid the strap, and did not open it.

“Mr Galloway don’t hold with lists,” he said. “You’ll know that, sir. Anybody who’s been in the family knows it. He won’t have a name wrote down in the house that he don’t have to. He keeps the number and that’s all. But I can’t give out corn to a number, and I can’t give out shoes. I’ve got to know whose feet.” He opened the book. “So I keep this. He knows I do. He’s never once asked to see it in twenty years.”

It was a list.

It ran down the left of each double page in Watkins’s slow hand, a name to a line, with the pages ruled across in columns for the weeks of the quarter. Every name had its line. Most had a second name after it, the name of the mother or the man, and some a word, old, or child, or at the breast, and against the children the allowance was half. He began at the top and read the names, from habit, as he read any column, and before he had got to the foot of the first page he had stopped reading them from habit.

Hannah. Hannah’s Jem. Little Hannah. Prince. Old Prince, old. Phebe. Charles. Charles’s Bett. Harry. Cuffee. Sam, Sam’s Nell, and three children with no names at all yet, only child, child, at the breast.

“Some of them haven’t names,” he said.

“Not till they’re past the second summer, sir. It’s the custom on the Ridge. Too many go in the second summer.” Watkins said it without any feeling at all. “There’s a name give at the breast, by the mother, but it’s not wrote till then.”

Cheston turned the page.

Against three names, a little way down the second page, there was a line ruled through in red ink from one side of the page to the other, through all the columns. Big Tom. Will. Toby. And in the margin, in Watkins’s hand, very small, gone to the enemy, Easter 1781.

“Toby,” said Cheston.

“Rachel’s man, sir. From the Neck. He’d been on the Ridge since the spring before, for the tobacco.” Watkins looked at the red line. “I struck them off the Monday after. You can’t carry corn for a man that’s not here. It’d be wrong in the account.” He was quiet a moment. “Their names is still there, under the line. I didn’t scratch them out. Only struck them, so the corn stops.”

Cheston looked at the three names under the line.

He had seen that line before, on a sheet from Amsterdam, a column he had asked for himself: Ran: 3. Taken again: 2. Here it was in his father-in-law’s corn book, with gone to the enemy where Ebeling had written entlaufen.

“How many?” he said. “On the Ridge.”

“Forty-one, sir, as stands today. That’s with the children. Twenty-three hands that go to the field. Before Easter of last year it was forty-four.” Watkins closed the book. “The Neck’s fifteen. The home place is twenty-eight. Mr Galloway’ll have told you.”

“He told me the number.”

“That’s all he keeps, sir.” Watkins buckled the strap. “I’d not want you to think he don’t know them. He knows every one. He’ll know Cuffee’s had a fever since Michaelmas without anybody telling him, and send down the bark. He’ll know Phebe’s carrying before Phebe knows it. He just won’t have them wrote.” He stood up with the book and stood holding it. “He says a list is what they sell you by. When a man dies, sir, and the appraisers come. Or when the King’s officers come up the river with a book of their own. A list is how it’s done.” He put the book back on the top shelf of the cupboard and shut the door on it. “I keep mine for the corn. I’d burn it tomorrow if he told me, and the corn would go wrong.”

He rode back by the creek, because the bay wanted water and so did he, and because he did not want to arrive at the house yet. He let the horse stand in the shallows below the mill and drink, and sat looking at the herring boys.

There were three of them, as he had seen from the road, ten or eleven years old, bare to the knee in the brown water with the nets. The woman on the bank had her basket half full. She was perhaps thirty, in a blue wrapper with the sleeves rolled, and when she saw a gentleman on a horse in the creek she stood up and stopped talking to the boys, and the boys stopped laughing. They stood in the water with their nets and looked at him, all four, and waited for him to go.

He did not know their names. He had read forty-one names in Watkins’s book half an hour before, and he did not know which of them were these.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Morning, sir,” said the woman.

He turned the bay and rode up out of the creek and on to the road, and heard, after a minute, when he was in the trees, the boys begin to laugh again behind him and the splash of a net, and the woman’s voice saying something sharp to one of them that made the others laugh louder.

He told Galloway the account was right. He told him at four, in the library, where Galloway sat in the afternoons with the Gazette and his spectacles and a window open on the garden.

“I know it’s right,” said Galloway. “Did thee read the other?”

“Yes.”

Galloway folded the Gazette and laid it across his knee.

“Well?”

Cheston did not sit down. He stood by the window with his back to the garden, where Nancy was walking along the top of the terrace wall with her arms out and the nursemaid below her with her arms out too, and he said what he had decided on the road to say.

“I’d like the names. All of them. The home place, the Ridge and the Neck. Written down.”

Galloway looked at him over his spectacles.

“Written where?”

“In a book. Mine. I’ll keep it. Nobody else need see it.”

“Somebody always sees it.” Galloway took his spectacles off. “Why?”

“Because you have the number in your head, and Watkins has the names on a shelf for the corn, and there’s no book anywhere in this house that says who they are.” He heard his own voice, level and dry. “I’ve seen a book like that, sir. I told you of it on the shore. In Amsterdam. Eleven hundred people in Courland, in the survey and not in the ledger.” He stopped. “I asked. I made them give the people a line. And now I come home and find I’ve lived four years in a house where nobody’s ever given them a line either. I’d like to give them one.”

Galloway sat for some time.

“Thee’s angry,” he said.

“No.”

“Thee’s angry, and thee doesn’t know with whom, and it’s thyself, and that’s the worst kind, because it wants doing something about.” Galloway laid his spectacles on the Gazette. “Sit down, James. I’ll not talk to a man stood at a window.”

Cheston sat.

“A list in the wrong hands is a code, or a confession, or a warrant,” said Galloway, “and the innocent man is the last to know which.” He folded his hands. “Thee sold from a list for eight years, James. On the quay at Chestertown. I don’t say it to wound thee. Thee knows it better than I. Thy partner’s ship came in from Bristol with a list, and the auctioneer stood on a cask and read it out, name and age and trade and how long to serve, and the planters came in their carts and bought from it. It was the list that did it. Not the men. A man can’t be sold by the head if nobody’s written his head down.” He looked at the window. “When I die, the appraisers will come into this house with their book and their ink, two of them, as the law says, and go through it room by room. They’ll write my chairs and my plate and my horses, and they’ll go down to the quarters and write every soul on the place with a price against each one, the old at nothing and the young at most, and my children will divide them by that list. John will have this house and most of the rest, and the appraisers’ list will say who goes with it and who goes to Benjamin and who goes to thy wife.” His voice did not change. “That list will be made, James. I can’t stop it. The law makes it. But I’ll not make it for them while I’m alive. I’ll not have it sitting in a press in my own house, ready for them.”

Cheston said nothing.

“Thee wants to give them a line,” said Galloway. “I understand it. It does thee credit. But a line in a book is the same line whoever holds the pen. Thy Dutchman’s line, that thee made him write. Who reads it?”

“I do. The men I answer to.”

“And when thee’s gone? When they’re gone? Who reads it then?” Galloway shook his head slowly. “Somebody always reads it, in the end. And it’s never the man who wrote it.”

The clock on the stair struck the quarter. Out on the terrace Nancy had reached the end of the wall and jumped, and the nursemaid had caught her, and they were both laughing.

“Then what would you have me do?” said Cheston.

Galloway was quiet for a long while.

“I’ve been thinking on it,” he said at last. “Since the Friday on the shore. I’m not done thinking.” He picked up his spectacles and did not put them on. “But I’ll tell thee what I’ll do, since thee asks for the names. I’ll say them. Now. To thee. And thee may do as thee likes with thy own memory. That’s thine. I’ll not write it, and I’ll not ask thee to.”

He did not wait for an answer. He sat back in his chair with his spectacles in his hand and his eyes on the garden, and he began.

“At the home place. Phillis, who was thy wife’s mother’s woman, and is sixty-one, and has the rheumatism in her left hand and won’t say so. Sukey, in the kitchen, who is Phillis’s daughter. Bett, Darby’s sister, who is the best hand with a cow in the county. Darby.”

He went on.

He went through the home place, room by room as the appraisers would, but not as they would: the kitchen, the dairy, the stable, the garden, the landing. He gave every name, and with each name a thing about the person that no appraiser would write. Isaac in the stable, who was afraid of the grey and would not say so. Juno, the children’s nurse, who had buried a child of her own the summer Nancy was born and had nursed Nancy with the same milk. Cato at the landing, who was Darby’s grandson and could not yet be trusted with the big boat. Twenty-eight. Then the Neck. Then the Ridge, all forty-one, Hannah and Hannah’s Jem and Old Prince and Cuffee with his fever, and the three with no names yet, whom he named, by the names their mothers had given them at the breast, which Watkins had not written. And at the end, in the same voice, three more.

“Tom. Will. Toby. That are gone.”

Then he stopped. He put his spectacles on again and picked up the Gazette from his knee and unfolded it.

“Eighty-four,” he said. “And three that are not here, which makes the eighty-seven I gave thee on the shore, and I was wrong to give thee eighty-seven, because they’re gone and I knew it. I’m an old man. I counted them in still.” He found his place in the Gazette. “That’s all. Go and see to thy children, James. Nancy will have broken her neck.”

He did not write it that night. He meant not to write it at all.

He sat at supper and talked to Galloway about the wheat and to Nathan, who came up from the boathouse for once and ate in the kitchen passage with the door open, about the third skiff. He heard the children’s prayers. He sat with Anne in the long parlour afterwards while she sewed and her father read, and the candles burned down, and the moon came up over the Eastern Shore and laid its road across the river to the window. The curtains in that room were never drawn. A Friend had nothing to hide from the moon.

He did not write it on the Wednesday either.

Phillis was up at four, as she had been up at four for thirty-five years.

She slept in the room over the kitchen, on the bedstead Miss Anne’s mother had given her the year she married Mr Galloway and brought Phillis with her: a rope bed with a straw tick and a blanket of her own, the only bedstead in that loft. Sukey slept by the chimney end with her two on a tick on the boards, where the warmth came up through the floor from the banked fire. Phillis got up without waking them. She got up slowly now, because of the hand, which was stiff in the mornings and would not close on anything until she had held it a while in her other one, and she sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and held it, and listened to the house.

Nothing yet. The river. A dog at the quarter row. Down on the landing, Cato’s bucket on the stones, going for water at the spring.

She went down the ladder with her right hand and raked out Sukey’s fire and fed it, and when it had caught she filled the brass pan with coals and went out across the yard with it, in the dark, to the big house. Bett had gone already to the cows; Phillis could hear the pails. There was a lantern in the stable where Isaac was with the grey, that was lame. In the quarter row below the garden the chimneys were beginning to smoke, five of them, sticks and clay, and the smoke came up white in the cold and lay along the roofs. Somebody down there was singing, very low, the way you sing when you are the first one up and do not mean anybody to hear.

Juno was at the back door of the house with the child’s linen over her arm.

“Gentleman’s up,” she said. “Candle in the east room. Since before me.”

Phillis looked up at the window. It was the only one lit in the whole of that side of the house.

She knew what he was doing. Everybody in the yard knew what Mr Galloway had done on the Tuesday afternoon in the library, with the window open on the garden, because Isaac had been on the terrace below walking the lame grey, and had stood there with the halter in his hand and heard every name, and come out to the kitchen after with his face gone strange and said them, as many as he could remember, to Sukey and to her. Phillis, who was thy wife’s mother’s woman, and is sixty-one. Isaac had said it in Mr Galloway’s voice, thee and all, and Sukey had laughed, and Phillis had not.

She had heard her name said in a list once before. She had been twenty-six, standing in old Mr Chew’s yard on the Herring Creek road in a line with twenty others, the spring the old man died, while two gentlemen from Annapolis went along the line with a book. One said the names and the other wrote. Phillis, twenty-six, sound. To Miss Anne. And three places along, Rose, nineteen, sound, a good spinner. To the son. That was all it was. Two lines in a book, three apart, and two different roads out of the yard the next morning. She had not seen Rose for eleven years after that. Now Rose was at the Hall’s place, over the creek, because the son had sold her there to pay for a horse; and on a Sunday, with a paper, Phillis could walk to her in an hour.

A list is what they sell you by. Mr Galloway said that. Mr Galloway knew.

She stood a moment longer in the cold with the pan of coals, looking up at the candle in the east room.

Then she went in, and down the passage in the dark, and knelt at the grate in the hall below the gentleman’s room, and laid the coals, and blew on them with her stiff hand cupped round the flame until they caught. The big house woke every morning on a fire she had lit. Nobody in it had ever once seen her light it.

On the Thursday he woke at five, as he always did, in the room that faced east with the twelve ledgers in the press behind him. He sat down at the table under the window and took up a pencil to do the firewood, because Anne had said he would and it was Thursday. He found that the sum would not come. The figures he had used to use were candles and washing and a horse and physic for the baby, and he could not now see any of them without seeing who carried the candles in, and who did the washing, and who walked the horse down to the river in the evening, and who had sat up three nights with the baby in March of ’eighty while the cough went on and Galloway sent to Annapolis. He had priced the board of a family in this house for two years and never once put the people who kept it in the column. They had been inside the word firewood.

He put the pencil down.

He took out of the breast of his coat the small pocket-book he had carried since Ostend: the one he had rendered from on Lady Day, with the quarter’s figures in it in his own abbreviations, that no eye in this house had seen. He turned it over and opened it from the back, at the last leaf, which was clean. He took up the pen.

He wrote Tulip Hill at the head of it, and under that The home place, and under that, in the plain hand he had used for bills of lading at Chestertown, Phillis.

He wrote them as Galloway had said them, in the same order, with nothing beside them. No age. No price. No trade. He found he remembered nearly all of them, and where he did not, he left a space rather than guess. He wrote the home place, and the Neck, and the Ridge, and he wrote the three names that the mothers had given at the breast, and at the foot, under a ruled line, the three that were gone. Then he sat looking at it. It took up four leaves, in a small hand. It had no total at the foot.

He did not hear her come in. He heard her stop, behind his chair. He did not turn round, and did not close the book.

Anne stood behind him in her wrapper with a candle she no longer needed and read it over his shoulder. He felt her read it. He had watched her read a column a great many times, and he knew the length of time it took her, and she took longer than that. She did not say anything. She leaned past him and took the pen out of his fingers, and dipped it, and in the second leaf, against a space he had left, where he had not been able to remember the name of Darby’s grandson, she wrote Cato, small, in her own plain hand.

Then she gave him back the pen.

She did not turn the book over. He waited for her to, and she did not. She did not look at the front of it. She put her hand on his shoulder for a moment, as her father had once done in the passage. Then she went out, and shut the door, and he heard her go down the stair to her own book in the hall, where she had written the number at the head of the page every January since she was fourteen, and never a name.