Refugees streamed out of Boston; we saw them on the roads, carrying everything they owned. Many had no place to go. The plague banners still hung from the windows of our house.
Up and down the coast, we were to learn, there were preparations for war. Men-of-war patrolled the harbors. Soldiers dug ditches; they threw up redoubts and ravelins.
In the Colony of Virginia, as in Massachusetts, the Governor sent out forces to seize Patriot gunpowder, and so disarm revolution. As General Gage’s, his maneuver occurred in the night, in darkest secrecy. The militia guards stationed at the Williamsburg armory having retired home to bed, a detachment of Royal Marines entered the powderhouse and removed fifteen barrels of powder, lifting them onto carts and disappearing with them before dawn. The Governor, Lord Dunmore, avowed that he had ordered the powder removed to deprive the slaves of possible armaments, should they rise; but the Virginia rebels, hearing that their stores had been confiscated, feared the opposite: that their Governor sought to deprive them of weaponry so that they should not be able to defend themselves against a Negro uprising of his own dire engineering. They feared that he had already called for the slaves to form into legions against their masters, so raising an African army to secure the British hold over the Colonies; they feared that slaves, enflamed with overheard talk of liberty, would assume that such freedom applied to them and take up arms, instituting murder in bedrooms and on balconies, sinking the region into impossible chaos and bloodshed.
Within our house, the only chaos was that of a dismal joy: the pleasure of girls at new-found health, the jubilation of children at the restoration of outdoor play; the relief of full convalescence after the long night of fever; the excitation of nerves amongst men eager to fight for a cause; the delight of the young in the spring’s heartless arrival.
My mother’s wounds were begun to smell. The reek was so great that the other servants slept on the floor in the house rather than endure the miasma near their pallets.
Mr. Gitney had begun to take a greater interest in the extremity of my mother’s condition. He prepared several cures which he hoped should combat the disease, far-progressed as it was.
My mother did not move; the encrustation was complete. She could not speak any longer; nor could she swallow without pain. Her sheets were fastened to her with her exudations.
In the extremity of the disease, her features could not be recognized as hers. Her visage was an assemblage of holes, the nostrils flaring with each breath. There was no kindness, no gentleness to this departure; nothing human, but rather a degeneration into some demonic substratum of the body that had waited to lay waste to all the lineaments of grace.
