Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

"The commercial spirit is a tie that binds all the parts of the state together; it gives them a common interest, and a common feeling." — Thomas Whately, The Regulations Lately Made Concerning the Colonies, 1765

The water in the mid-Channel had a vicious chop that slapped against the hull of The Sunflower, throwing up a fine, salty spray that dried into small white crusts along the wool of Alfred’s sleeve. He stood by the pin-rail with his boots braced against the damp planks of the deck, his eyes fixed on the pale line of the Dorset cliffs until the low mist took them entirely. His lungs did not have that dry, burning ache that had kept him in his room at Great George Street through the winter, but the air still tasted of coal-smoke and old cabbage from the port they had left behind two days ago.

Beneath his linen waistcoat, he felt the heavy, quiet weight of his own portmanteau. He had packed it himself in the dark, shoving his extra shirts and his ledger into the leather without looking at them, but he had left the small bundle wrapped in brown paper on the corner of the mattress. It was the pair of thick wool stockings that Arthur had bought for him from a hatter near Charing Cross. He had left them there because taking them would have looked like an agreement to return when the spring assembly met, and he had known by the time the coach reached the river that there would probably be no returning from this voyage. 

He wondered if Arthur had found them himself when he went up to turn the key in the door, or if the maid had simply bundled them into the wash with the household linen.

Luka leaned his massive shoulders over the binnacle-box, his beard white with salt-crust and smelling of the tallow they used to grease the blocks. "You look like you has left your purse in an ordinary, Alfred. Or perhaps a girl from that town? Girls from the London are very pale, like cheese maken in western counties. Very soft, very quiet, but they have teeth like pike if you touch their ribbons, yes?"

"I didn't leave a girl," Alfred said, his Russian coming slowly yet instinctively. 

"I left my… baggage. Most of it was too heavy for the coach."

"Baggage easily replaced," a sailor named Nikolai said, sliding down the ladder from the forecastle with a line of tarred hemp over his shoulder. He had sharp, squinting brown eyes which were almost invisible as he examined Alfred with suspicion. "But a passport from the big offices is not so cheap. The master, he say you are boy of a very great lord in London, one of those… gentlemen who sit on the Board of Trade and tell King how many ships may leave the river. It is true he has forty servants and a coach with silver springs?"

"He has six servants and the coach is green," Alfred said, switching to Russian while his cheeks darkened a little. "And he is not an old man. He looks just a bit older than me, if you must know."

Nikolai exchanged a quick look with Luka, his mouth tucking into a silent whistle. "Your age? And he sits on the King's council? These English are stranger than the Turks. But that does not explain why His Excellency Mr. Braginsky should take such an interest in your education. The mate told us that when the treaty-papers were brought aboard at Kronstadt, there was a separate packet for the legation in London, and inside was a book of verses with your name written on the leather. Why should he send books to a lad in the provinces?"

"We have an… old understanding," Alfred said, his hand tightening on the shroud. He looked away from their searching gazes and down at the dark water.. "It is merely a friendly alliance between us. There is nothing political in it."

Nikolai leaned his hip against the rail, his expression shifting into something narrower and somehow more disbelieving. He reached into his shirt to touch the small brass icon of St. Nicholas that hung beneath his wool flannel, a mechanical habit whenever a sailor crossed into territory that felt new. "A friendly alliance does not come in lavender-scented paper, Mr. Kirkland. The mate says the letter from the courier was sealed with his private crest, the one with the small bird, not the imperial eagle. It is not the way a gentleman writes to an ordinary acquaintance."

"He is a very particular man," Alfred muttered, feeling a sudden, hot flush creep up from his collar, his skin turning a bright, defensive red under his tan.

"He is a man who has never taken a wife," Luka said, his voice dropping into a low tone that carried the heavy, superstitious weight of the Russian villages. His eyes traveled over Alfred's tall, broad-shouldered frame with a mixture of raw curiosity and a deep-seated, religious revulsion. To men from the white-sea ports, the small, unnatural attachments of the western courts were a foreign plague, an abomination that belonged to the decadent Germans and the French. 

Yet, there was a strange, lingering awe in his voice; Ivan Braginsky was evidently a powerful figure, a man who seemingly moved with the weight of the northern courts behind him. "I have known of him for almost thirty years, and in our country, a gentleman who reaches this far in their life without a household is looked upon with many prayers. The priests say it is a shadow on the soul. But,” Luka leaned closer to Alfred, as if uncovering a great conspiracy, “The fellows in the watch whisper that he has his… own rules. They say he keeps his secrets in his lock-box, and no man dares look at his keys."

"They shouldn't be looking at anything," Alfred snapped, turning his back on them once again. "And your crew knows nothing about it. If anyone says they know what he writes, they are a liar as well as a scoundrel."

The sailors didn't laugh this time. They stood in the damp air, torn between the ancient, holy fear of the unnatural and the immense, glittering prestige of the man who had written the letter. To them, Alfred was an anomaly, a provincial boy from the wilderness who somehow held a thread leading straight to Ivan Braginsky.

They nodded at Alfred and went back to their stays slowly, their boots heavy on the wet wood, leaving Alfred alone with the wind and the salty spray.

The memory of that wet deck still came back to him whenever the October wind brought the scent of rotting cedar up from the York River marshes.

Alfred sat by his writing-desk in the parlour of the Virginia house, his long legs hooked over the rung of the split-bottom chair which had previously belonged to Arthur. The room was warm, smelling of the dry pine-knots that were burning in the chimney and the bitter ink he had spent the afternoon mixing from blue galls and vinegar. He had three sheets of thick paper laid out before him, the margins ruled with a steady hand, but the nib of his pen remained dry.

He had been trying, since his return to the colonies, to find a way to write to Ivan without sounding like a schoolboy or an insurgent. It was an impossible task; if he wrote too much about the assembly or the price of tobacco, he would sound like a clerk from the customs-house, and if he wrote about the redcoats who were currently patrolling the wharves in Boston, he would sound like one of those recently rising radicals who spent their nights throwing brickbats at the King's officers.

Worse than the letters was the silence from Great George Street. So far, Arthur had not sent so much as a single line of instruction or a scrap of newspaper. The shipping manifests came through the governor’s office as they always did, signed by the clerks of the Privy Council with that small, narrow script that looked like old wire, but there was never any mark on the margin to show that the master of the house had looked at the sheets. Alfred felt the omission like a physical weight in his side, a cold, empty space where the old, irritating presence used to be.

The people in the taverns had been loud, disorganised, and full of a loose, drunken resentment that spent itself in broken windows and small-beer riots. He had spent three months traveling through the western settlements, sitting by the hearths of the tobacco-planters and listening to the assembly-men argue about the currency bills, saying nothing at all while his presence settled into the floorboards of the province. Slowly, the noise died down into something else. 

The planters did not shout about the stamps anymore; they simply stopped buying the English cloth, their wives taking out the old spinning-wheels that had been left in the granaries since the old war. 

Alfred felt his own body strengthening with every wheel that turned; his lungs had grown thick and clear again, and the long headaches that had kept him in his room at Westminster had vanished entirely behind his temples.

In the summer of '68, the needle had shifted in his marrow. It was peculiar, a wordless twitch that every Nation carried in the space their body occupied, the knowledge that another of his kind had crossed a border. Matthieu was back in Quebec. Alfred had known it before the post-rider cleared the crossing at Alexandria; he had felt the sudden, cool draft of spruce-gum and river-ice that always preceded the northern mails, a clean, but gradually lesingly French scent.

The letter had arrived three weeks later, written almost entirely in French on thin, blue-tinted paper they used in the Montreal offices.

The town is very quiet now, Alfred. The French people have been permitted their own laws by the new governor, which makes them less inclined to look at the garrison with their knives in their hands. The timber is very expensive because the Boston men are buying up the white pine for their masts, but the fishing is good.

It seemed Matt had caught himself, and switched to his still broken English. 

Arthur work much. He stay in London. England is okay, but he looks very tired when the mail comes from New York. He purchase two grey horses for carriage at Great George Street, very tall from western riding. He not go into country this summer because the business is too heavy. He looks very thin his face now, even more then before.

Alfred turned the page over to see if there was any postscript hidden under the wax, but the paper was bare.

Matthieu was a poor liar, always softening bad news behind polite domestic updates, but Arthur was clearly alive and working, buying grey horses for his carriage and reading every dispatch that arrived from the New York mail.

He was fully aware of everything happening across the colonies, he simply had no desire to write to Alfred.

1771

Alfred had grown during the dark months of winter. His old homespun coat was tight across his shoulder-blades, the linen of his sleeves showing three inches of wrist where the cuffs had shrunk from the wash, or simply his recently acquired height. He had taken to wearing his hair tied with a simple leather thong instead of the ribbon Arthur had bought him, and his face had lost that round, smooth look he once had; the bone had come through the skin around his jaw, sharp and angular, giving him the look of those long-legged men who lived by the axes in the western woods. He didn’t look like a child anymore. But he still was.

The pressure from the north had been rising for months, a steady, low humming in his ears that felt like the vibration of a copper wire under a heavy screw. It was the Townshend Acts; it was the board of customs commissioners sitting in Boston like three crows on a barn roof; it was the two regiments of foot who had been quartered in the town since the autumn, their red coats bright against the grey snow of the lanes.

On the night of the fifth of March, Alfred was sitting in an ordinary near the King George Courthouse, fifty miles south of the Potomac. The room was full of the smell of fried pork and the sour cider the planters drank when wine was too dear, the men around the hearth talking in low, monotonous voices about the price of corn-parchment. Alfred had been trying to read a pamphlet on the ditching of clover when the pine table beneath his elbows gave a sudden, sharp shudder. It was not the movement of a horse in the lane or an earthquake in the hills; the liquor in his mug remained perfectly flat, but his left side went dead cold, a heavy pain that started behind his third rib and moved down his thigh until his leg doubled under the bench.

He slipped from the seat into the sawdust, his head nearly hitting the iron fender of the chimney.

"Mr. Kirkland!" the tavern-keeper shouted, dropping his wooden ladle into the fat. "Are you took with the pleurisy, sir? Fetch some vinegar, boy!"

Alfred did not hear him. His ears were full of an iron bell being rung frantically. He could smell wet wool, horse-dung, and the sharp, hot sulfur of the powder they used for the wild-duck shooting, but thicker, close to the blast of a furnace when the iron is running.

Through the mist in his eyes, he saw the lane. It was not the wide, sandy road of the Virginia settlements; it was the narrow, trampled alley near the Boston custom-house, the snow turned into a grey slush by the boots of sixty men who were shouting at a wall of red cloth. He could feel the stones against his own knuckles, hard, round river-pebbles that had been torn up from the gutter, wet with ice and the slime of the fish-stalls. A man with a dark face and a wool cap was leaning over a timber-balk, his hands raised toward the bayonets, his mouth open in a shout that had no sound in Alfred's ears.

Someone screamed, and then the world went entirely white with a dry, flat roar that didn't sound like a musket at all, but rather like the splitting of an old sail in a gale.

He felt like there was a sharp, hot iron driven through the bone of his breast, followed by a sudden, sickening weight that felt as though three men had sat down upon his shoulders at once. He lay in the sawdust of the Virginian tavern, his mouth unable to close, fingers tearing at the hem of his own coat until the homespun ripped from the cuff to the elbow. He could feel the lead going into the flesh, one, two, three drops of hot metal that turned into five distinct spots of red on the snow near the sentry-box.

When he opened his eyes, the tavern-keeper was pressing a wet rag against his forehead, his face ghostly white under his unpowdered wig.

"The regulars," Alfred whispered, his lips blue. "They have fired into the people at the custom-house."

"What regulars, sir?" the man asked, looking toward the window as if he expected to see a troop of horsemen through the glass. "There's no troops here, Mr. Kirkland. The nearest garrison is at the fort in Carolina."

Alfred sat up slowly, his left arm shaking so violently he had to tuck it into his waistcoat to keep it from striking the table. "In Boston," he said, his voice uncannily calm even to his own ears. "They have killed five of the town-lads near the sentry-box."

The next three months were a long, silent funeral that moved down the coast from the Massachusetts bay to the Carolina sounds. It was not the newspapers that told him the names of the dead; he knew them before the post-riders cleared the ferry at Alexandria. 

He knew apprentice the Samuel Maverick’s age because his own teeth throbbed with the same green ache that comes from a broken jaw, and he knew the rope-maker Caldwell trade because his own palms smelled of tarred hemp for a fortnight after the burial. How this was possible, anyone’s guess was as good as his own.

In May, he rode up to Philadelphia. The city was full of the pamphlets.

The people did not look at him with the old, easy curiosity when he walked into the coffee-houses near the river; the merchants looked up from their ledgers, their eyes staying on his face for three or four seconds before they returned to their calculations. They knew he was a Virginia man, but they also knew he had been raised under the roof of a powerful British lord, a man who sat on the King's council and signed the warrants for the tea-tax.

"Mr. Kirkland," a merchant named Mifflin said. Even his last name was enough to make those around him wary.

 "We have word from the packet that the King’s ministers are to repeal the duties on the white-lead and the paper. They say the tea-duty is to remain, just to show the right of the matter. Is that what your… connections in Westminster tell you?"

"I have no connections in Westminster," Alfred said, his hand tightening on the brim of his hat until the leather creaked.

"They say Lord North is to have the Treasury," the merchant continued, his voice perfectly level, perfectly dry. "He is an administrative man, they tell us. A man who understands the tonnage-rates. Did you see him when you were in Great George Street?"

"I only saw his carriage," Alfred said firmly. 

He turned his back on them and went out into the rain. This suspicion was a new thing, a thin grease that seemed to cover every hand he shook. They did not trust him because they could hear the clean, sharp accent of the London schools beneath his drawl, and every time he spoke of the common law, they looked to see if he had a crown-office warrant hidden in his boot.

He spent the night in a small tavern near the docks, his window looking out toward the Delaware where two British frigates were lying at anchor to watch the salt-boats. He was not angry with the soldiers who had pulled the triggers in the King's street; they were nothing but thirty-shilling men from the Irish regiments who had been hit with chunks of ice and didn't want their brains knocked out by a mob of sailors. He was angry because Arthur had not come. Arthur should have been on the deck of the first frigate that cleared the Downs after the news reached London. He should have been standing on the wharf in his old blue coat, telling the governors they were fools and the merchants they were knives, and that the boy belonged to him and not to the Lords of the Treasury. Instead, there were only the letters. There were only the clearances from the Custom-house, the warrants under the Great Seal, and the small, dry notices in the Gazette that the King had been pleased to appoint a new collector for the port of Salem.

"He’s still in London," Alfred told the dark ceiling. "He is sitting there with the papers because it is easier than looking at the road."

By the winter of 1772, the wire had slacked slightly. Lord North had repealed the duties on the glass and the paper, leaving only the three-pence on the tea as a monument to the abstract rights of Parliament. The committees of correspondence were formed in the towns, small groups of elderly men who wrote long, tedious letters to each other about the charters of King James, their style so heavy with legal Latin that it read like a textbook from the temple.

On a wet night in October, Alfred sat by his desk at the York River house, an unlit candle between his elbows. He took up his pen, dipped it into the stone inkstand, and began to write a letter he had been turning over in his mind since the day he fell into the sawdust at King George Courthouse. He wrote for three hours without looking up, his hand moving with a sudden, jerky speed which had none of the schoolboy hesitation of his earlier years. When he finished, he folded the sheet into a narrow square, took a stick of black wax from his drawer, and pressed his own small seal into the grease, a simple turn of his initials that looked like nothing more than an old iron mark from a tobacco-crate.

Four months later, the reply arrived from Ivan.

The courier was a young clerk from the Russian legation at Philadelphia, his boots covered in Jersey mud, his face white from three days in the saddle. He handed the packet to Alfred without a word, took his half-crown, and went back to the ordinary to sleep for twenty hours.

Alfred broke the heavy wax with his thumb hastily. As the thick parchment unfolded in his hands, a slow, genuine smile broke across his face for the first time in months, warming the cold, hard lines of his jaw.