PROLOGUE

Margaret and Jed Sr. met in Boston at a banquet celebrating the end of the War for Independence.

Jed had been in the city only a week since the long trek back from his disbanded regiment. Along the journey home, sometimes spending the night under a tree, barely able to sleep from the hunger and biting insects, he had been haunted with memories of his friends’ bodies ripped apart by musket fire or bayonets. Every night, he would lie on the damp ground or in a lumpy tavern bed (which often had as many insects), and — between the visions of blood puddles and grey, dying faces — he would list the things he missed from home. A soft bed with clean linens was usually first on the list; then a fire in the bedroom – already crackling when he woke. Milk in his tea, sipped slowly from a porcelain cup. Sugar. A window seat, the smell of books, the way his older sister Zilpha always knew the answer to all his questions, and even the way she thought she was entitled to tell what she knew, even when he did not ask. Laughter and clever quips about someone’s new clothing or a friend’s romance. How women put flowers in their hair and had small hands. As he plodded along, step after step, hour after hour, he ached with longing for his life before the War.

But then, his first week in Boston, back in the home of his youth on Charles Street, sleeping in his old four-poster bed, waking to a morning fire, and downstairs finding milk and sugar on the tray beside the porcelain tea cups, it was not as he had imagined.

“I found myself changed,” he said to his oldest daughter Sophie soon after the news of renewed fighting with the British had reached them in 1812. “I saw my face in the glass, and I hardly knew myself. I was gaunt and tanned, and the difference between the condition of my face and the gild around the mirror somehow unsettled me so, I had to look away. I could not use the glass for some time, to my sister’s dismay. She did not even know that the girl who lit our fires had lost two brothers, together in one battle, six years before – before I even had enlisted, myself. I don’t recall if I had known it before I left or if I only discovered her grief upon my return.”

He did recall, although he never described it to his children, his second day back at home – the day he woke up from almost eleven hours of sleep in that beautiful bed. On that day, he ambled to the study after luncheon, and took his favorite Jonathan Swift from the shelf where he could always rely on finding it. Practically skipping to the window seat, he remembered how, during the war, he had yearned innumerable times to do this very thing. Arriving at the seat, however, he found himself unable to sit on the cushion there, unable even to touch its shiny silk threads. Unnerved but undeterred, he had turned away to look for another place to sit, and suddenly the room started to quiver and the air to press in upon him as if he were too far under water. There was a silver candlestick on a desk just at his left hand, and suddenly a surge of hatred for this candlestick inexplicably seized his heart, and he grabbed it and hurled it with fury across the room. Then, he knew, he had to leave the house.

He marched with his head down, feeling ripped open, over Beacon Hill to the cemetery, and, fallen to his knees, he wept at the grave of a person he did not know. He prayed to God, “What is this horrible emptiness? I should be rejoicing!” But the emptiness only grew when God did not answer. He held one rough hand over his mouth to muffle his sobs, and with the other he clutched his jacket collar over his heart. He could only hope that passers by would leave him to himself, taking him to be grieving for the body lying under the stone he faced.

Eventually, his humor improved enough, or was depleted enough, that he looked around him, and saw that dusk had come. The willow on the headstone now looked less sad and gentle, and more like the cover through which a spirit might emerge. The graveyard began to whisper. He hurried out the gate and stumbled home. That night, he supped with his family, wincing from time to time at the clinks of silverware on the plates, saying little. In the parlor afterwards, he was numb and dull. He retired early. For the next two days, he did not even rise from bed, and his family put it down as exhaustion. On his fifth morning in the city, he smelled baking bread as he woke, and the scent seemed so innocent that he was enticed to try again to walk among the living. Two nights later was the banquet.

“I thought he was eloquent, and I admired his passion,” Margaret told Sophie not long before she died in the birthing of Sophie’s youngest brother. Sophie was peeling potatoes and her mother, huge with Matthew in her belly, was stirring a pot over the fire, sweating. Sophie had asked why Margaret’s mother wrote so few letters to them and never traveled to help with any of the new babies. Margaret had decided that Sophie, now twelve, was old enough to hear her parents' story in a more complete way than she and Jed had previously offered.

“He was not like the other gentlemen,” she continued. “They were always trying to impress each other. But your father did not seem concerned with how others regarded him. I was curious about what had made him this way. I had been a precocious child – I was impertinent and willful, as I’ve told you. Society strives for an order that brooks no divergence, no caprice. Everyone knows their place and knows every other person’s place. By the time I met your father, I had accepted this, so I believed; I had learned how to keep most of my disagreeable thoughts to myself, just as all my friends and acquaintances had done. But what I had not yet done was acquiesce to marriage, and I had no plan to do so.”

Margaret went over to the table where Sophie worked with her potatoes, and slowly lowered her heavy body onto the bench there. “At that time, my parents were pursuing an arrangement for me, trusting that I would comply when it mattered most. There was a judge who was nearly forty to my seventeen, whose second wife had died, and he was looking for a third because he still had no son. My parents were well-acquainted with the judge’s brother, and the family was one of the few in our circle who were not secretly Tories. But I wanted to meet a handsome young man and to fall in love with him! I used to dream of love, as in the Shakespeare plays I had read, and I imagined receiving poems and riddles on scrolls bound up with ribbon. I dreaded marrying a man the age of my parents and becoming a mother before I had felt any romance. I used to imagine that I was Beatrice sparring with my Benedick – from what play?”

“Much Ado about Nothing,” Sophie offered proudly.

It warmed Margaret’s heart that, although her children now were farmers, Shakespeare had not been left behind.

The young Margaret and Jed were introduced at this banquet, surrounded by bunting, and both wearing uncomfortable shoes. At first, she excused herself from his company quickly, because his health seemed so poor that it caused her some distress, but later over squab and herbed potatoes, he took offense at something her brother said about Negroes, and he came rather alive in his anger. With his face flushed and his spirit animated, he proclaimed his unwavering respect for a Negro man whom he had fought beside, and announced his hope that a federal Constitution, once written, would right the Declaration of Independence’s transgression of not abolishing slavery in the entirety of the United States. His outburst had so taken everyone at the table by surprise, for he had been dolefully quiet until that moment, that everyone froze in place for a second or two, and no one dared to answer him right away. His sister spoke first and artfully steered the conversation from the Constitution and slavery to the coming winter temperatures. But although Margaret’s interest was piqued by Jed’s fervor, her family held firmly that one State should not be allowed to tell another what they could or could not do, so when she requested of her parents the next day that they please arrange an occasion when she might talk more with Jedidiah Forster, they declined.

But Jed had noticed her face as she had listened to his diatribe. Where almost everyone else at the table had looked aghast to one extent or another, she had leaned forward to listen and her mouth possibly had curved with a faint smile. In the course of the rest of the meal, they made eye contact twice. He intended to make his way to her after dinner, but she was constantly surrounded by other men, and Jed could not bear their bravado. Finally, he was in a discussion about the new nation's future with an old friend who had lost an arm in the War, when he realized that she was standing very near him, alone. He knew this window of opportunity would slam shut imminently, so he turned quickly to her and, abandoning his manners, asked, “Have you read any of the Free Republican's essays, Miss Perry?” She had not, but she was interested to hear of their contents, for should they not all be thinking now about what was to come next?

Two days later, he successfully prevailed upon his sister to call on Margaret, and to deliver to her – in a scroll tied with ribbon – surreptitiously if necessary – the latest Free Republican's essay. In little time, Zilpha and Margaret became good friends, and after a while, Margaret began to spend much time at the home of the Forsters, where Jed so often happened to be.

Zilpha, for her part, was content with the benefits of adhering to social rules, generally, and believed that women and men simply occupied different spheres, so a marriage should be made to place a woman in the sphere she most desired, one that would be advantageous to her particular interests and sensibilities; who the man, himself, might be was less important, if he came from a respectable family and practiced good hygiene. She was no romantic, but neither did she see that marriage to an aged judge would do her friend any good at all, and since she knew her own family to be above reproach and well connected, she let Margaret and Jed talk and walk together frequently, keeping her distance as much as would be upright.

It did not take many walks or conversations for the two young hearts to fall deeply and passionately in love, and little time more for them to start thinking of their mutual future.