“Rules may teach you to be blindly obedient, but they’re no real protection against the world,” Marcus continued. “Because one day you will knock so hard against a rule you’ll break it—and you’ll have nothing standing between yourself and disaster then. I found that out when I ran away from Hadley to join the first fighting in Boston in 1775.”
“You were at Lexington and Concord?” I knew that Marcus was a patriot because of his copy of Common Sense. He might have answered the call to arms when the first shots of the war were fired.
“No. In April, I was still obeying my father’s rules. He had forbidden me to go to war,” Marcus said. “I ran away in June.”
Matthew sent a lump of misshapen metal spinning across the table. It was dark, almost singed in places. Marcus caught it.
“A musket ball—an old one.” Marcus looked up with a quizzical expression. “Where did you get this?”
“In the library, among Philippe’s books and papers. I was looking for something else, but I found a letter from Gallowglass.” Matthew reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded packet of paper. The handwriting on the outside was scrawling and went up and down like the waves.
We didn’t often talk about the big Gael who had disappeared more than a year ago. I missed his easy charm and wicked sense of humor, but understood why watching Matthew and me raise our children and settle into our life as a family might be difficult. Gallowglass had known his feelings for me were unrequited, but until Matthew and I had returned to the present where we belonged, he had remained devoted to the job Philippe had given him, namely to ensure my safety.
“I didn’t know Gallowglass was in New England when I was a boy,” Marcus said.
“He was working for Philippe.” Matthew passed him the letter. Marcus read it aloud.
“‘Grandsire,’” Marcus began, “‘I was at the Old South Meeting House this morning when Dr. Warren spoke on the fifth anniversary of the late massacre in Boston. The crowds were very large, and the doctor draped himself in a white toga, following the Roman style. The Sons of Liberty greeted this spectacle with cheers.’”
Marcus looked up from the page, a smile on his face. “I remember people in Northampton talking about Dr. Warren’s speech. Then, we still thought the massacre had marked the low point in our troubles with the king, and that we would be able to mend our differences. We had no way of knowing that a permanent break with England was still to come.”
Here, at last, was some history I could use to properly frame Marcus’s account of his life.
“May I?” I held out my hand, eager to see the letter for myself.
Reluctantly, Marcus parted with it.
“‘The numerous links of small and great events, which form the chain on which the fate of kings and nations is suspended,’” I said, reading one of the lines from the letter. It reminded me of what Matthew had said about a vampire’s memory, and how it was often ordinary occurrences that were preserved there. I thought back to my afternoon playing with the twins, and wondered again whether today I had planted some future remembrance for them.
“Whoever would have imagined that little more than a month after Gallowglass wrote this letter, a shot fired on a bridge in a small town outside Boston would become Emerson’s ‘shot heard around the world,’” Marcus mused. “The day we decided that King George had mistreated us long enough started out just like any other April day. I was coming home from Northampton. It had been a warm spring, and the ground was soft. On that day, though, the winds from the east blew cold.”
Marcus’s eyes were unfocused, his tone almost dreamy as he remembered that long-ago time.
“And with them came a rider.”
Les Revenants, Letters and Papers of the Americas
No. 1
Gallowglass to Philippe de Clermont
Cambridge, Massachusetts
6 March 1775
Grandsire:
I was at the Old South Meeting House this morning when Dr. Warren spoke on the fifth anniversary of the late massacre in Boston. The crowds were very large, and the doctor draped himself in a white toga, following the Roman style. The Sons of Liberty greeted this spectacle with cheers.
Dr. Warren stirred the assembly with mention of his bleeding country and calls to stand up to a tyrant’s power. To avoid war, Warren said, the British army must withdraw from Boston.
It will take only a spark to set rebellion alight. “Short-sighted mortals see not the numerous links of small and great events, which form the chain on which the fate of kings and nations is suspended,” Dr. Warren said. I wrote it down in the moment, for it struck me as wise.