Chapter One

Annapolis — Monday, 22 to Tuesday, 23 December 1783

There were thirty-one turkeys in the yard of the Ship, and Rose had counted them twice, because Mr Pinkney had paid for thirty.

“It’s the one with the bad eye,” said the younger of the two girls. “He walked in. Off the street. He’s been walking in and out all morning.”

“Then he’s walked in once too often.” Rose wiped her hands. “Catch him.”

“Mistress, he’s not ours.”

“He is now,” said Rose. “He’s in my yard on the day the General dines. Catch him.”

It was the Monday before Christmas, cold and bright, with a hard wind off the Severn laying the smoke of every chimney in Annapolis flat along the roofs. The town had been mad since Friday, when the General rode in from Baltimore and the guns at the dock fired thirteen times. Since Friday there had been nothing but dinners. Today the Congress was to give him one, at Mann’s, for two hundred gentlemen; and tonight there was to be a ball at the State House, lit from cellar to cupola, with every lady in the province in a gown she could not afford.

Mann’s could not cook for two hundred. Nobody could. So Mr Mann had come round to the Ship on Thursday with his hat in his hand, which Rose had enjoyed, and Mr Pinkney had come into the kitchen afterwards pink to the ears and said they were to do the turkeys, and the hams, and sixty pies, and the oysters for the ball supper, and that it was an honour.

“Is it paid?” Rose had said.

“It’s an honour.”

“Is the honour paid?”

Mr Pinkney had said that it was none of her business; and then, at the door, that it was paid very handsomely, and that he would not have dogs in the yard.

So since Thursday the Ship’s kitchen had been a battle that Rose was winning, with four girls and a man named Ishmael who turned the spit and did not speak. She had the boy Ned on a stool in the corner by the meal bin, where he was not to move from, plucking a pigeon very slowly, feather by feather, with his tongue between his teeth. He was three, going on four. He was Mr Pinkney’s, on a paper for fourteen pounds, and she put him to bed every night in the loft over the wash-house where she slept herself, and had not yet decided what she thought about either of those things.

The girls caught the turkey with the bad eye after a chase round the water butt that made Ishmael laugh, once, like a door. It went into the coop with the others. Rose turned back to the long table, and her pies, and found a stranger at her elbow.

He was a negro of about forty, in a good blue coat made for somebody a little larger, and he had sat himself down on an upturned tub with one of her turkeys and was plucking it, fast, with his sleeves pushed up, as if he had been told to.

“Who are you?” said Rose.

“Jack.” He did not stop plucking. “A Virginia member’s man. We lodge over your stable. He’s at Mann’s till dark, and he doesn’t want me till he wants his boots off, and I can’t sit in a room. Never could. You looked like a woman with more birds than hands.”

“I’ve a man for the birds.”

Jack looked across the kitchen at Ishmael, who was at the spit, turning it, with his eyes on the fire, as he had been for four days.

“You’ve a man for the spit,” he said.

Rose considered him. Then she pushed a second basket towards him with her foot.

“Don’t tear the skin,” she said. “The General’s to eat that.”

“The General,” said Jack, “will eat what he’s given, like the rest of us. I’ve seen him eat a cold potato off a drumhead. But I’ll not tear it.”

He plucked six turkeys before noon and did not tear one.

He talked while he did it. He had spent seven years standing behind chairs saying nothing, and he had found a kitchen where nobody minded. He had been at Philadelphia with his master when the Congress sat there, and at Princeton when the soldiers came and the Congress ran away. He had seen a Frenchman eat a frog.

“And you’re Virginia,” said Rose.

“Born on the Rappahannock. My master’s place is above Fredericksburg.”

Rose put a lid on a pie and crimped it, all the way round, with her thumb.

“There was a woman sold out of this town,” she said. “In ’eighty-two. To a Virginia gentleman. Name of Grace. About twenty-four. A tall girl, with a scar here.” She touched her own chin. “She could sew. She sang in church. She had a little boy she was made to leave.”

Jack’s hands slowed on the turkey.

“Which gentleman?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t let see. I was being sold myself, that day, in the same yard.”

He did not answer at once. He looked across the kitchen to the stool by the meal bin, where Ned had stopped plucking his pigeon to watch the stranger, and the pigeon had stopped being plucked with him.

“That’s hers,” said Jack.

“That’s hers.”

Jack went back to the turkey, slower now. He took out a few feathers and then a few more.

“There’s a great many gentlemen in Virginia,” he said at last, “and a great many Graces. I’ll not tell you I know her. But I talk to everybody in every kitchen from here to the Rappahannock. And I’ll ask.” He looked up. “A tall girl. Scar on the chin. Sews. Sings in church. Name of Grace, sold at Annapolis in ’eighty-two. With a boy she left. Named?”

“Ned.”

“With a boy named Ned, at the Ship, that plucks pigeons.” Jack nodded, as if he were writing it in a book. “I’ll ask.”

Rose crimped the next pie. Her thumb had gone wrong on the last one, and she went back and did it again.

It was nearly two, and the hams were out of the copper and steaming on the long table like something from a battlefield, before he told her the other thing. She did not ask for it. It came out of his talk sideways.

“Philadelphia,” he said. “Now there’s a town. Every street straight, so you can’t get lost, though I did. And free men everywhere you look. A man who sells oysters off a barrow on Front Street in a cocked hat and calls the gentlemen ‘my dear’. You know Pennsylvania has a law.”

“I’ve heard.”

“Have you heard what it says?” Jack held up a turkey by the legs, inspecting it. “My master read it me himself, out loud, so I’d know. If a gentleman from outside brings his people into Pennsylvania and keeps them there, they’re his for six months. And on the day after, they’re free. Nobody has to sign anything. Nobody has to say anything. You’ve only to be there, and wait.”

Rose had stopped crimping.

“Then why aren’t you free?” she said.

Jack laughed. It was a good laugh, and she would remember it afterwards for that.

“Because my master’s in the Congress,” he said. “The law doesn’t touch the Congress. He read me that part too.” He laid the turkey down. “And besides, he’s a careful man. Every year we were there, at the end of five months and some weeks, he’d remember a sudden piece of business at his brother’s in Delaware, and take me over the line for a night, and bring me back. Like a woman takes a pie out of the oven before it catches.” He looked at her pies, and at her. “No offence.”

“I’ll not take any.” Rose found that her hands had gone on working without her, and that she had crimped the same pie three times. “He tell you that too? About Delaware?”

“No,” said Jack. “He didn’t tell me that. I worked that out for myself, the second year.” He picked up the next turkey. “I’m not a fool, mistress. I just can’t count past six months on my fingers without him seeing me do it.”

Rose took the pie out to the oven in the wash-house herself, past the coop where the turkey with the bad eye was waiting its turn, and stood in the heat of the open oven door for longer than a pie takes to go in.

She was thinking about her sister.

She was thinking about Phillis in July, on a stool in this kitchen, with her bad hand in her lap, saying I’m sixty-two. There’s the law. Nobody can free me. Not Mr Galloway, if he wanted. Not Miss Anne. She was thinking that Phillis had been right, about Maryland. Phillis was always right about Maryland. And that Maryland stopped at a line.

She shut the oven door.

She did not tell anybody. She had found this year that a thing said out loud in front of a white man sometimes made him go a very odd colour and happen; and that a thing said too soon, in front of the wrong one, could be stopped before it started. She would carry this one a while, as Darby had carried his.

At seven o’clock the State House was lit.

Rose saw it from the top of Cornhill Street, walking behind the handcart with six hams and four hundred oysters and three tureens of the soup Mr Pinkney called turtle, which was not turtle but did not know it. There was a candle in every window, up to the little windows in the cupola. It looked, Rose thought, like a thing that had been set on fire very carefully on purpose. At the railings stood the people who had not been asked, watermen and apprentices and negroes by the dozen, free and not, looking at the lit windows as people look at a fire.

The kitchen at the back was not much of one; the State House had been built for laws and not for dinners. A woman from Mann’s was in charge of it, in a cap like a ship under sail, and she took the oysters from Rose as if Rose had brought her a dead dog.

“Is that the turtle?”

“It’s what Mr Pinkney calls the turtle.”

The woman from Mann’s lifted the lid of the tureen, and smelled, and put the lid down again, and looked at Rose with something very near respect.

“Well,” she said. “Nobody’ll know.”

They were set to opening oysters in the passage behind the great hall; and because the door at the end of the passage did not quite shut, Rose saw the ball.

She had cooked for a great many and heard the fiddles through a great many walls. She had never once seen one.

The light came back off the gilt and the glass and the ladies’ silk until the air itself seemed to shine. A band at the far end was playing a country dance that she knew from the kitchen at Tulip Hill, where Sukey’s boy played it on a comb. Two long lines of dancers went down the middle of the floor, and at the head of them, with the first lady, was the General.

He was a head taller than any man in the room, in blue and buff, and he danced as Rose had seen good horses go: not fast, not showing off, with all the strength kept back, so that you knew it was there by how easy everything was. He went down the set with the first lady, and handed her back to her place, and bowed. Then, while the music was still going, he went to the next lady in the line, who had not expected it, and bowed to her, and took her out, and went down the set again.

“He’s going to dance with all of them,” said the younger girl, behind Rose, with an oyster in one hand and the knife in the other. “Look. He’s going down the line. Every one.”

“He’s being polite,” said the older girl.

“He’s being clever,” said Rose. “Every lady in this province will go home tonight and tell her grandchildren she danced with the General. And her husband will hear about it every Christmas till he dies, and vote how she tells him.” She took the oyster out of the girl’s hand and opened it herself. “Open your oysters.”

But she did not go back to the board at once. She watched him go down the line. One very old lady, in a gown that had been in fashion when Rose was a girl, laughed out loud when he bowed to her, and put her hand in his as if he were her son. He gave every one of them the same bow, and did not once look at the clock.

He was a Virginia gentleman. Rose knew that. He had people at his house on the Potomac, more than Mr Galloway; everybody knew that too. She did not forget it while she watched him. She only found that it was possible to watch a man do a thing well and know what he was, both at the same time, and that it made her tired.

Grace had gone to a Virginia gentleman.

She shut the door the rest of the way and went back to the oysters.

The ball went on till two. The oysters were gone by eleven, and Mr Pinkney’s turtle by half past, and the woman from Mann’s said that nobody had asked what it was, and that one gentleman of the Congress had had three plates of it and asked for the receipt.

“Tell him it’s a secret,” said Rose.

“Is it?”

“It is now.”

At three in the morning she went up the ladder to the loft and found Ned asleep on her bed with the plucked pigeon in his arms like a doll. She took it off him. She lay down beside him in her clothes, and lay awake until the window went grey, and thought about the six months, and about Delaware, and about a woman taking a pie out of the oven before it catches.

The General was to give back his commission at noon.

“Resign it,” said Mr Pinkney, at breakfast, in the kitchen, with a cup of chocolate he had made himself because every girl in the house was asleep on her feet. “Give it up. Just like that.” He shook his head. “There’s not a man in Europe would do it. Mr Chase says so. Mr Chase says there’s never been a general in the history of the world, with an army at his back and the country in his pocket, that gave it all up and went home to his farm. Except one Roman. And that was two thousand years ago, and they made a statue of him.”

“Why’s he doing it, then?” said the younger girl.

“Because it isn’t his,” said Rose.

Mr Pinkney looked at her over the chocolate.

“It’s the Congress’s,” said Rose. “They lent it him. He’s giving it back.” She took the cup out of his hand, because he was going to spill it, and put it on the table. “And if you want to see it done, Mr Pinkney, you’ll go up now, because every soul in this town will be on that hill by eleven and you’ll not get in at the door.”

“I can’t go,” said Mr Pinkney, unhappily. “There’s the house. There’s the delegates’ breakfasts. There’s...”

“There’s me,” said Rose. “I’ll go. And the girls. And I’ll come back and tell you, and you’ll have it better from me than from any man in the Coffee House, because I’ll tell you what he did and not what he said.” She took off her apron. “Ishmael will mind the fires. Ishmael doesn’t care for Generals.”

Ishmael, at the spit, which was empty, did not deny it.

The State House was shut, with a soldier at every door, and the hill round it black with people, and boys in every bare tree, sitting along the branches like crows.

Rose did not try the front. She went round to the back, to the kitchen door, where the woman from Mann’s was standing in her ship’s cap with her arms folded, letting nobody in.

“I’ve come for my tureens,” said Rose.

The woman from Mann’s looked at her for a long moment.

“Your tureens,” she said.

“Three of them. Mr Pinkney’s. He’ll want them for the delegates’ dinner.”

The woman looked at the crowd behind Rose, and at the two girls behind Rose, and at Rose; and then, with the face of a woman who had been cooking since four in the morning for a man she would never be thanked by, she stood aside.

“They’re in the passage,” she said. “By the stair. If you go up the stair by mistake, I never saw you.”

The stair went up from the back passage to the lobby behind the Senate room, which was full of gentlemen standing. Nobody looked round at three women from a kitchen. Nobody ever had. Rose stood by the door frame with the girls behind her and looked over the shoulders of the gentlemen into the room.

It was a plain white room, smaller than she had thought, and very light. At the far end, on a little platform, sat a small stout man in black: Mr Mifflin, someone whispered, the President of the Congress. Along the walls the members sat at their desks, fewer than she had expected. Up above there was a gallery, full of ladies. Rose looked for Miss Anne, and found her, in the second row, in grey, beside Mrs Chase, who was in a great deal of purple. Miss Anne was sitting very still with her hands in her lap.

The members had their hats on. Every one of them, sitting at his desk, indoors, with his hat on, as if he were in church in a hurricane.

“Why’ve they got their hats on?” said the younger girl, in Rose’s ear.

“Hush.”

“But why?”

A gentleman in front of them, without turning round, said quietly, “Because they’re the government, my dear, and he isn’t. They keep their hats on. He takes his off.” He paused. “It was decided on Saturday. In committee. It took two hours.”

At twelve o’clock exactly the door at the side of the room opened, and the Secretary of the Congress came in, and behind him the General.

He was in his blue and buff, the same as at the ball, with his sword on. He came into the middle of the room, where a chair had been put for him, and he did not sit in it. He stood. He took off his hat. And the President said something Rose could not hear, and the General bowed to the room; and every member of the Congress put his hand to his hat, and lifted it an inch off his head, and put it back on. Not one of them bowed.

“There,” said the gentleman in front of Rose, very low. “That’s it. That’s the Revolution.”

The General took a paper out of his coat.

Rose did not hear most of what he read.

His voice was not a loud one, and the room was full of breathing. She heard words: Providence, and the army, and his countrymen. She watched him instead. She had told Mr Pinkney she would tell him what the man did and not what he said, and she found it was what she would have done anyway.

He held the paper in his right hand. Partway through, the hand began to shake. It was not much. Rose would not have seen it if she had not spent her life watching the hands of people who could not tell her what they were thinking. A little shiver in the paper, as if a draught had found it. He put up his left hand and took hold of the other side of the paper, and held it with both hands, and went on reading.

In the gallery a lady had begun to cry. Then another. Then, it seemed to Rose, most of them. Mrs Chase had a handkerchief to her face the size of a sail. Miss Anne did not cry. She watched him as Rose was watching him, at his hands, and her face did not move at all.

Then his voice went.

It went on one sentence, near the end. Rose heard it go, as you hear a rope go: a little crack, and then nothing, and then the sentence again, lower, and slower, as if he had had to pick it up off the floor and was carrying it the rest of the way in his arms. Something about God. Something about the country. Commending it. And then he stopped reading, and folded the paper, and put it in his coat.

He put his hand into his coat again, on the other side, and took out another paper. This one was folded long, and had a seal on it, and a ribbon. He went up to the little platform, three steps, and held it out to Mr Mifflin, and Mr Mifflin took it.

That was all. He did not say anything else. He held out a piece of paper, and another man took it, and the thing was done.

Rose found that she had her hand over her mouth.

Mr Mifflin read something back to him, in a voice like a man reading a will. Nobody listened. The General stood in the middle of the white room with his hat in his hand and nothing else. Then he bowed again; again the hats came up an inch and went down; and he came back down the room towards the lobby door, towards Rose, and the gentlemen fell back on both sides without being told.

He went past her so close that she could have touched his sleeve.

She did not look at his face. She looked at his hands. They were large hands, with the knuckles red from the cold, and they were quite empty, and still shaking a little, and he had put one of them flat against the front of his coat where the commission had been, as a man touches the place where his purse was, when he has paid a debt and is not yet used to it being gone.

Then he was through the lobby and down the front stair, and the crowd outside saw him in the door. The noise they made came in through every window of the State House at once, so that the glass sang in the frames.

His horses were at the door; he was to be home on the Potomac for Christmas Eve. He rode out of the circle at a walk with the crowd running beside him and did not look back, and the boys in the trees cheered him out of sight down West Street, and then went on cheering for a while, because they had climbed the trees and did not want to come down yet.

Rose collected Mr Pinkney’s three tureens from the passage, because she had said she would. She was standing in the cold at the kitchen door with a tureen under each arm when Miss Anne came round the side of the building and found her.

She had got away from Mrs Chase. She was alone, with her grey hood up, and her face was white with cold or something else. She stopped a yard off.

“Rose.”

“Miss Anne.”

“Were you there? Inside?”

“In the lobby. By the door. For my tureens.”

Miss Anne looked at the tureens. Something came into her face that was not quite a smile.

“Did you see his hands?”

“I saw them.”

“So did I.” Miss Anne turned and looked back at the State House, the white building with its cupola, and the crowd still standing on the hill round it in the wind, not going home, as if something else might happen. “He stopped,” she said. “Nobody asked him to. Nobody could have made him. He had the army, and the country, and they’d have given him anything. And he stopped.” She was quiet. “He gave it back to the men who’d lent it him, and they kept their hats on, and he went home.”

“Mr Pinkney says there was a Roman.”

“There was. They made him a statue.” Miss Anne pulled her hood closer. “I don’t suppose it was any comfort to him.”

Rose shifted the tureens.

“Somebody’ll ask him back,” she said. “You’ll see. A man like that. They’ll want him back the first time it goes wrong, and it’ll go wrong. They’ll come down that road with their hats in their hands.”

“Yes. I expect they will.” Miss Anne was looking down the hill, past the roofs of the town, to the grey water, and the far shore, where the Eastern Shore lay low and flat beyond the Bay. “But he’ll have stopped first. That’s what I came to see. Whether it can be done. Whether a man can put a thing down before it’s taken off him.” She turned back. “I’ve a question I wrote down, in October, that I can’t answer. I thought he might answer it for me.”

“Did he?”

Miss Anne thought about it, honestly, in the cold.

“He answered it for him,” she said. “That’s not the same.”

She went away down the hill towards Church Street, to find Mrs Chase’s carriage. Rose stood at the kitchen door with the tureens.

She told Isaac on the Saturday, in the yard of the Ship, when he came in with the cart for salt. He came every Saturday now, whether Tulip Hill needed salt or not, because Mr Galloway had stopped asking what he did with the morning.

She gave him a basket with a cloth over it and a ham bone in it for Sukey’s soup, and when he had put it in the cart she held on to the handle a moment longer than she needed.

“Tell my sister,” she said, “I’ve a new receipt for her. From Philadelphia. Tell her it takes six months, and you can’t hurry it, and you mustn’t let anybody take it out of the oven.”

Isaac looked at her.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. She’ll know.”

Isaac was not a fool either. He looked at Rose a while longer, at her face, and then, slowly, up the road, north, towards the Patapsco and the Susquehanna and whatever lay beyond the Susquehanna that nobody on the West River had ever seen.

“Six months,” he said.

“Six months. Don’t you say it to anybody else, Isaac. Not Sukey. Not Bett. Not the horse.”

“I’ll not say it to the horse,” said Isaac. “The horse can’t keep anything.” He climbed up onto the cart, and took the reins, and sat for a moment. “That’s a long time to cook a thing, Rose.”

“It’s the right time,” said Rose. “I’ve been cooking since before you were born. I know.”

She went back into the kitchen. Ned was on his stool by the meal bin with a new pigeon. The back room over the stable was empty. Jack’s master had gone home to Virginia for the holidays, and Jack with him, who had promised to ask.

Rose took up her knife.

“Feather by feather,” she said to Ned. “Don’t tear the skin.”