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  Then his target saw him. A bright smile shone around a cigar so aromatic that Key could smell it all the way across the arena. The captain’s two fists were full of loaded coin pouches, his white shirt flecked with mud, trousers caked from the knees down.

  “Captain Boyle!” he clarified. “I say there, Captain! Tom!”

  Tom Boyle squinted into the lantern light, saw the lawyer, and he let out a bellow of joy.

  “Well!” He looked around the arena, seeing no way through or around the shouting men. “Stay where you are!”

  Key nodded, and wriggled his way back through the crowd to the relative seclusion near the fence. He had to wait only five minutes before one of the wrestlers got the other around the neck, and the strangling fellow surrendered.

  The crowd roared. Money flowed back and forth. As if appearing out of a foggy forest, Boyle appeared from the wall of spectators, carrying a flat-brimmed black hat loaded with coins and promissory notes.

  “Longshanks! Well met, my friend!”

  “Always gambling, aren’t you?” Key said. “Billiards, dice, cards, cock fights—”

  The captain threw an arm around the taller fellow. “Don’t forget the goat races. Life’s no good without gambling. Let me see you. Frank, you look like a poached rat! Are you heading for Baltimore?”

  “Coming from it. I’m going to Terra Rubra. How are you?”

  “Oh, the life of a captain, you know—too much of everything, not enough of anything.”

  Key smiled at the truth of it. “Are you heading out to sea?”

  “Back to Baltimore. I waylaid here for the match. Made few coins to make up for our losses in the West Indies.”

  “Losses?”

  “We ran the blockade with a load of cotton, but a British upstart pinned us on a sandbar. I didn’t see the color of the water because of the fog. You should’ve seen this boy, Frank. Half terrified and completely furious. He barely knew what to do with his own arms and legs. The rascal seized our cargo and all my flags and pennants!”

  “Oh, no, Tom!”

  “We flopped our way to the port of Charleston, where I left the Comet until I can acquire new flags and a new charter. Were you in Baltimore?”

  “Yes. I defended a free Negro in a property case.”

  “Did you prevail?”

  “I did. It was a question of easement.”

  “Let me get a clean shirt and trousers. I’ll meet you inside. Find a table by the fire, away from other ears. I have grave news.”

  The tavern was nothing more than an old farmhouse whose task had been shifted from growing food to serving it. There were three small rooms on the lower level, two with fireplaces, each with tables for guests. Upstairs were four cramped bedrooms for overnight travelers, and in each room a bed that could reasonably sleep three grown men.

  But down here, in the foremost parlor to the road, an inviting fire snapped in the fireplace and flushed the aroma of hickory and cedar through the dining rooms, competing with the constant scents of turkey and venison stews from the kitchen. The tables and chairs were all mismatched, creating an informality that worked. On the mantel a phalanx of salt-glaze stoneware stood guard duty. Next to the hearth were a bootjack and a pottery urn holding several umbrellas. Overhead were beefy chestnut beams, hand-hewn and soaked with a hundred years of smoke and stories. The tavern area was actually three rooms, which flowed into each other, converted from the parlor and bedrooms when this had once been a farmhouse.

  There were many guests here tonight and almost every table was taken. Across the room, the most interesting view was that of a stout man and a drab woman in travelling clothes, with a model of a ship on the table between them. The man was picking at the tiny ship’s rigging while also stirring an aromatic bowl of very hot turkey stew.

  In the corner of the next room over, a Negro man played a fiddle, smiling at the guests and playing tunes he knew by heart. He had performed for the guests of this tavern for many years now, by choice, for he was a freed man. He played cheerily, but softly, so folks could hear themselves think and engage in private conversations, and he was known to play special requests.

  At a table near the hearth, Frank Key whistled softly to himself and tampered with a little square pencil and a much-scribbled piece of paper. He was barely aware of the whistling, but this was a tune he couldn’t get out of his head.

  On the table rested his cup of lemonade and a chunk of sugar in a wooden bowl, with a pair of sugar nippers. He liked looking at the sugar, which reflected with particular loveliness the flickering fire, like new snow.

  “No whistling,” said a voice suddenly behind him. “It’s bad luck.”

  Key looked up at Boyle. “Oh, Tom. Welcome, please. That’s only on ships, isn’t it?”

  “Right. No whistling on ships.” Boyle cuffed him on the shoulder with an easy and lingering hand. “That’s ‘Anacreon in Heaven.’ It’s hard to sing.”

  “That’s why I’m whistling. The Anacreontic Society would hang me if I tried to sing it.”

  “Have you ever been to one of their concerts?”

  “Yes, a few. Their tenors enjoy the challenge of ‘To Anacreon in Heaven.’ Those high, long notes. I once wrote words to it, back in 1805.”

  “I remember. Stephen Decatur in Tripoli. I liked your words. They made me want to go out and burn something. What are you writing there?”

  “A poem for my wife,” the lawyer said, “to practice my penmanship. I’m attempting to get every letter of the alphabet into one quatrain.”

  “You’ll succeed if you keep using words like quatrain. How is Baltimore’s apprentice Shakespeare this night?”

  “Oh, no, please,” Key protested. “Don’t rank me among the literati. I’m merely a rhymester. I compose in haste, simple couplets—”

  “You’re too humble.”

  “‘It is as if the rose should pluck herself or the ripe plum finger its timid bloom.’”

  “Now, see, that was lovely enough.”

  “That was Keats.”

  “Oh … well, yours or his, poetry is in your blood. Go on, admit it.”

  “There I can’t argue. I’m descended from a sixteenth-century poet-laureate to His Majesty King Edward the Fourth.”

  “Royalty! Well!” Boyle clapped him on the arm, then fingered the purple fabric of the jacket sleeve. “What’s on your coat?”

  “Oh … foam from a horse’s mouth. I had an adventure.”

  “Today?”

  “The coach team ran amuck. I played a small part in stopping them.”

  “Mm. Horses. I’d rather saddle a dolphin. At least they’re clean. Ale?”

  “I prefer wine.” With a whisper, Key added, “But not the wine here. Tea, please.”

  “And some stew?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Venison or turkey?”

  “Venison, please. But only a small bowl.”

  “You don’t eat enough.” The captain left his chair and stepped between two cupboards full of New England redware mugs and bowls and into the kitchen where the tavern keepers and their four daughters cooked day in and day out. Tavern keeping must be a life of drudgery, Key thought, but then he remembered that the keepers and the daughters always seemed chipper.

  He pondered on God’s plans. Was each person born to his place and constructed to be content there? He had been born to a privileged life, but felt no sense that he deserved it above any other countryman. Was he a lawyer or a poet? A road construction superintendent or a plantation squire? Should he join the Army or become a judge? What was his destiny? Should he or God choose?

  Who am I?

  “What’s that face? Having big ideas again?” Boyle had returned with two glazed bowls of steaming venison stew to see Key lost in another tightly woven skein of thoughts.

  “Some,” Key admitted. “I wouldn’t trouble you.”

  “Yes, you will.” Boyle sat down and plucked a clay pipe from a small stone vase of them on the hearth. With nipp
ers sitting next to the vase he clipped a half-inch off the pipe’s long stem. “Where’s the humidor? Ah—there.”

  “At least eat before you smoke,” Key said.

  Boyle smiled. “I like my pleasures stacked tight.”

  As the venison stew, too hot to eat, steamed passively between them, the captain tamped tobacco into the pipe and lit it with a twig from the fire. The fatherly aroma soon entwined with those of the stew and the fire.

  “Your law practice is prosperous, isn’t it?” Boyle asked.

  “Mmm.”

  “And by now you must have your new baby?”

  Key beamed wistfully. “Yes, my little daughter.”

  Boyle’s eyes twinkled. “You want for nothing, your reputation is sterling, your wife worships you, your children glow, your plantation is abloom and even your slaves adore you, yet you’re beset by purple moods. Why do you do that to yourself?”

  Embarrassed, Key felt his cheeks flush. “I hadn’t meant to be any particular color.”

  “I’ll sit on you till you hatch.”

  Though he hesitated a moment longer, Key knew he couldn’t duck away from Boyle’s intuition. Trying not to sound too impassioned, he said, “I’ve just come from Washington. I’m disturbed that so many representatives are pressuring President Madison to declare on England. I was with him when Henry Clay, Langdon Cheves, John Calhoun and somebody named Grundy visited and shamelessly pushed for war without even waiting for me to take my leave. They’re relentless to push us into a war. A war, Tom … as if they don’t remember what that means.”

  “England’s blockading us, not the other way around. Cutting off our rights to trade on the high seas; the nation must maintain its independence. That means trade with other nations. There is a global market opening up. What good is it to lathe a table leg or knit a sock in Maryland if we can’t ship it to Belgium or Portugal for profit?”

  “Profit is not superior to patriotism in my mind.”

  “Frank,” the captain said, “Profit is patriotism.”

  In any conversation it was never long before Boyle’s gamesmanship surfaced. He was an anti-idealist of the first order, a hard-boiled entrepreneur by whom every opportunity for wager or challenge was eagerly seized. The only things he protected more fiercely than freedom of trade were his ship and crew.

  “But don’t you think it’s poor sportsmanship,” Key asked, “to make war on England in this dark hour? They’re fighting for their very survival. It’s like casting our lot with Napoleon.”

  “If the British want to fight for their own survival, let them bring their soldiers back from our western territories and leave the West to us.”

  “But what is a war really about? Vengeance and conquest?”

  “There are other rewards.”

  “You mean Canada.”

  Boyle smiled wickedly at the prospect of gamesmanship, which he couldn’t pull off all that well, because he really wasn’t wicked, and he actually looked appealing when he did that. “Canada will make a good state, I think.”

  “Oh, not you too …” Key shook his head as firelight danced on his sand-colored curls. “If we do that, the nation will suffer God’s retribution. Such evil will bring divine punishment. Yet I’ve failed to use my influence to discourage it. I was sitting right there in the same room with the president, yet I said nothing. I hid behind my law practice even as the future of my nation teeters on a needle’s point. I’m a coward.”

  “Don’t be a martyr. You might not see so much evil in war if you watched the British seize your crewmen off your own deck.”

  Key looked up. “Oh, Tom …”

  Boyle nodded. “Lost two men.”

  “I’m so humbly sorry.” And his expression confirmed that he really was. “What were you doing?”

  “Smuggling.”

  “Really …”

  “In their opinion. It’s the British who’ve been stifling commerce, not I, not us. The blockade is their problem, not mine. The water under my ship is free water.”

  He stirred the stew and took a juicy mouthful.

  Key watched him, plumbing the captain’s expression for wisdom that eluded him. Without much of an appetite, he tapped his spoon absently on the scratched wood of the table. “I pray nightly for wisdom, a sign, but despite my piety I receive no holy guidance. Now we flirt with conflict against the most powerful nation on earth and I have no idea which way to bend.”

  Boyle frowned. “You wouldn’t bend toward Britain, would you?”

  “Oh, no,” Key replied, “but I am against armed conflict on American soil.”

  “I’ll happily take it to English soil.”

  They paused as a girl of about twelve years came into the room, retrieved a broom from the corner and shambled out again.

  “I was thinking of joining the Army,” Key said. “To make some kind of …”

  Boyle let his spoon clack down on the edge of his bowl. “You’re no field soldier! You’re a squire. A gentleman of letters. America doesn’t need you as a fighter. We need you as a lawyer and a poet.”

  “What good will that do?” Key asked. “I want a better world, but not this way. I’m a pacifist.”

  Boyle tapped him on the hand in a light but warning manner. “Pacifists can only exist as long as there are warriors around to defend them.”

  Poised and quiet, Key knew he was bringing down the mood of what should be a pleasant meeting between friends, but he couldn’t help it. Nor could he completely shake the raw truth in the captain’s declaration. Boyle was right.

  “War is so random,” Key said, having no better response. “It starts out one way, then ends some other way that no one anticipated. What if the Canadians fight back? What if they don’t want to be a state?”

  “The Canadians? Fight?” Boyle offered a laugh of derision.

  “Disputes between nations should be solved with diplomacy. With mutual respect.”

  “Fine. I respect them. What happens when they don’t respect me?” When Key again had no answer, Boyle continued. “You don’t belong on a battlefield. You’re a man of order. The chaos would madden you. The Army has only a few thousand men, the governors won’t let their militias cross over state lines, the militia commanders don’t support the Army regulars—”

  “You’re making my points for me, sir.”

  “Frank, you’re too practical to be impetuous,” Boyle said. Then he grinned somewhat sheepishly and added, “I suppose the opposite could be said about me.”

  Key tipped his head very slightly. “Then what can I do?”

  “There are other ways you can serve.”

  “How?”

  “Run for office. You’re a famous attorney. You had the spunk to defend Aaron Burr when no one else wanted to. Everyone knows you could be elected to Congress any time you please. Senator Francis Key.”

  “Mmm …”

  “President Francis Key!”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Why not?”

  “So distasteful,” Key murmured, almost a whispered thought. “I find it odious to aspire to fame and fortune.”

  “That’s because you already have a fortune. Men with money are often quick to dismiss its pursuit.”

  Key sighed. “You’re a fountain of axioms today, aren’t you?”

  “Little me? You’re the president, not I.”

  “You wouldn’t speak like this if you had seen poor Mr. Madison struggling with this very question, with those men biting at him. Party politics is so rancorous, political ambition so crude … pride is a sin. I can’t find it in myself to lust for a title.”

  “The office seeks the man. You’ve been positioned by fate, and not to try cases of Negroes’ rights in sweltering courtrooms.”

  “You’re not the first to ask,” Key told him. “I’ve been blessed with luxuries which allow me to serve the good of others—”

  “I’ll make a wager with you that you’ll be on the Supreme Court before—”

  “Oh, no, no wa
gers with you! I will not gamble. Not with you, certainly!”

  The captain’s friendly expression flashed wickedly in the firelight as he took a big spoonful of stew. “You have the package for greatness, Frank.”

  The lawyer troubled over this. “But do I have the will to carry through? That is what makes men great, while I am but a benevolent mediocrity.”

  With stew in his mouth like a schoolboy, Boyle said, “Well, you can’t be a monk like you want. You’re too curious.”

  Key smiled at the captain’s conviction about him. Boyle spoke with the quick-time abbreviation of a sailing man who needed to get his point across the first time, much different from Key’s slow articulations. While the poetic lawyer cultivated every word, each syllable in each word, and paused to think in the middle of sentences if necessary, the captain spoke his mind confidently and expected instant results.

  “Your directness is your competitor’s bane, Tom.”

  “I love my competitors.” Under the canopy of dark hair, Boyle’s pale blue eyes flashed with the thrill of it all. “I give them suggestions and help them run their businesses so they can challenge me further. They keep me sharp.”

  The fire crackled loudly as if to punctuate his sentiments. As if in mutual agreement to pause, each revisited his bowl of stew and listened to the fiddler. But Boyle’s eye wandered the room, for he was always observing the horizon.

  Key noticed. “Something?”

  Boyle kept his voice low. “That man over there. He’s building a model of a frigate.”

  “Yes, I saw.”

  “He’s making a mess of it.”

  Key felt himself smile despite his troubled pattern of thoughts. “What is America to you, Tom? What are we? Who are we?”

  Boyle’s attention returned to see the change in Key’s expression. “You’re about my age, aren’t you? Thirty-three?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “You and I were born just as this nation was born around us. Like everything that’s worth having, it grew out of bloodshed and trial. Since I was sixteen I’ve commanded cargo ships. Today I have a partner, own ships and I speculate in real estate. That’s America for me. The next ship and what I can earn with her.”