Judas Flowering by Jane Aiken Hodge Page A

Tondee’s—”
    â€œThe talk flows free. Father used to say men were worse gossips than women. But Francis would never speak of me, Hart. Never.” And with this firm, revealing phrase, she left him.
    Hart and his aunt left for Charleston a few days later, and he was relieved to find the Mayfield house there undamaged, and his aunt’s man of business ready with a list of possible tenants. In South Carolina, even more than in Georgia, the mobs had been roused by the news of the Boston Port Bill, and people who had lived contentedly all their lives on remote plantations were now eager to move into the comparative safety and undoubted luxury of Charleston. Anne Mayfield was able to choose the most eligible of three possible tenants, and Hart found himself free to take the next week’s packet for Boston, or rather for Salem.
    It was a strange, disturbing journey. He had promised his mother—and, indeed, himself—that he would be cautious in what he said and did. He would watch, and listen, and say as little as possible until he was established in his new life. This was made easier for him by his youthful appearance. In Savannah he had been Purchis of Winchelsea, and treated with deference. On board ship he found himself merely a boy on his way to college. Easy enough for a fair-haired young man who still needed to shave only once a week, and whose voice would occasionally betray him, to keep quiet and listen to his elders talk.
    But what he heard appalled him. If there were any Loyalists on the packet, they were keeping as quiet as he was. In Savannah the upper classes at least had always insisted that whatever they might think of Parliament and its vagaries, they were loyal subjects of King George III. There were no Loyalist toasts on the packet. If toasts were drunk,they were to the Continental Congress that had been summoned for the fifth of September at Philadelphia, and to the ill-treated citizens of Boston.
    Worst of all, the more Hart heard of what happened in Boston, the more it shook him. What right had Parliament, weeks away over the sea, to take a decision that must mean ruin for a whole city? And it seemed more and more likely that a British garrison was to be imposed on the city, almost as if it was a hostile one, captured in time of war. He was glad to stay quiet and listen, but it was a very sober young man indeed who disembarked at Salem for the land journey to Harvard College.
    Once there, he threw himself into his studies with an enthusiasm that won him golden opinions from his tutors. There was little enough to distract him. As Aunt Mayfield had warned him, the other students tended to be both younger and less experienced than himself. After running his own plantation, he inevitably felt himself a man among boys and could not bring himself to join in the frolics, the drinking and swimming parties, or the riding excursions with which they enlivened their studies. They, for their part, laughed at his Southern drawl and suspected his Southern loyalties. Georgia was the only one of the thirteen colonies that had not sent representatives to the Continental Congress at Philadelphia. Busy planning a non-importation agreement that would hit Great Britain where it hurt, in her trade, the Congress still had time to resent Georgia’s indifference. As a Georgian, Hart found himself inevitably suspect among the radical youth of Harvard.
    He did his best to write cheerfully to his mother, describing everything that was comic and different about his college life, without hinting at its loneliness, but she must have guessed at it, for she was soon writing to urge that he visit Abigail’s cousins at Lexington. Abigail had written to them about him and had had a warmly hospitable reply. “Only,” went on his mother’s fine scrawl, “Abigail is not quite sure about their politics. You will be careful, my dear boy.…”
    Careful! As if he was ever anything else. He