War Read Free

time.
    Jack Frake stood in a space on the side of the bluff that overlooked the York River on a far edge of his property, a rough length of bare rock hewed by rain and wind ages ago and sheltered beneath a cluster of black locust trees above. He had discovered it shortly after his arrival at Morland as an indentured felon. He claimed it as a kind of sanctuary, a place to pause and think and reflect in the necessary closure of solitude. He came here after long periods of living and dealing with other men. It served the same purpose as the cubbyhole on the cliff of Cornwall he once repaired to as a boy.
    He was thinking of the words he had written about the colonies and England last night in his study:
    “What cleaves us is as wide as the ocean that separates us. It is a distance between souls, between minds, between ways of looking at things. That ocean helped to create that cleavage. It removed our ancestors for a time, as it once removed us, from the immediate concerns and power of kings and the ambitions of men who would be kings, and allowed us to see what could be accomplished without them. It allowed us to see clearly — those of us who bothered to see — what was necessary for men to live their lives unfettered by allegiances to the arbitrary and superfluous. For it not only obliged us to rely on our minds to master nature here, but to look at ourselves in a cleaner, more radical light, and to see what was possible within ourselves and without. And, once we had done that, that other cleavage in soul and mind between the nations became as much a fact as the ocean, and there was no returning to an ignorance of it. Once that wasdone, we could bow no more, neither to nature nor to kings nor to men who would be kings.…”
    There was one word, or one brief expression, that would identify one side of that cleavage and explain why no reconciliation with the other was possible. The answer still eluded him, after all these years. The problem did not distress Jack Frake. He knew that the answer would come to him, in time. His soul, or his being, shone with a certitude as bright as the rising sun.
    Etáin’s constant reminder to him over the years had been that so many men had yet to catch up with him. The years had passed, and now it was no longer a matter of so many men. Nor was it a matter of the colonies catching up. Rather, it was a country that was beginning to catch up with him, a country that was beginning to see itself as such, and not as a collection of deferential dependents. A series of crises and protests, intervals of escalating violence and retaliation, were convincing his fellow Americans that no reconciliation was possible with men who intended to rule. He had known it for years. No, he thought. For decades.
    Such certitude does not breed vanity in a man. Pride, yes. Impatience, yes. Even a persuasive, unanswerable arrogance. But, never vanity.
    He reflected now on the years that had passed, on all the events that populated them, the events that had impelled his fellow Americans closer to his state of certitude. Closer, but not quite there. Not quite able to grasp the sense that, regardless of the wisdom or ignorance of the men in power, regardless of their intentions or benevolence, those men were either the blind or willing pawns of an idea that would not die until it had been challenged and refuted.
    Gone were many of the men in power who had contributed to the widening cleavage. George Grenville. Gone. Thomas Whateley, his protégé. Gone. Charles Townshend, who wished to relieve England of the burden of taxes by imposing them on America. He had read that Townshend, when he proposed his duties in the Commons, laughed at the idea of a distinction between internal and external taxation, and had sneered at the gallery that as a consequence he did not expect a statue to be erected in his memory in America. He was gone, too, as well as most of his taxes, except the one on tea. And it was that remaining tax that