"He'll be the death of me, by accident or design. Where is he now?"
"Timothy? Ah, he's long gone, back to his father's place in Calvert County."
"False friend!" the poet muttered. He paused a moment and then fell back in anguish on his pillow. "Ah God, it escaped me I was wed! Where is Susan, and what said she of my illness on our wedding night? For I take it 'tis another day. ."
The kitchen woman laughed. " 'Tis plus three weeks ye've languished 'twixt life and death!"
"As for Mrs. Cooke," Sowter said, "I can't say how she felt, for directly we fetched ye to bed she was gone for Captain Mitchell's in Timothy's keep. Haply he did your labors for ye."
"Back to Mitchell's!"
"Aye, she's legal-bound to drive his swine, ye know."
" 'Tis too much!" Ebenezer cried indignantly. "For all she's a hussy, the Laureate's lady shan't drive swine! Fetch her here!"
"Now, don't ye fret," the woman soothed. "Susie's run away twice already, to see for herself what health ye were in and make ye her wondrous thistle-physic. I doubt not she'll do the same again."
"Three weeks a-swoon! I scarce know what to think!"
"St. Christopher's nightmare, friend, think o' getting well," Sowter suggested cheerfully, "then ye can roger Mistress Susan from matins to vespers, if ye dare. I'll tell your father-in-law thou'rt back to life, but 'twill be some weeks yet ere ye have your health entire. Many a poor soul hath been seasoned to his grave." He gathered up his medical paraphernalia and prepared to leave. "Ah yes, here is a present Timmy Mitchell left ye."
"My notebook!" the Laureate exclaimed; Sowter handed him the familiar green-backed ledger, now warped, worn, and soiled from its peregrinations.
"Aye, ye lost it in the inn at Cambridge, and Tim brought it out when last he came for Susan. He said ye might have verses to write in't whilst ye rest your six months out."
"Ah God, I thought 'twas stolen with my clothes!" He clasped it with much emotion. " 'Tis an old and faithful friend, this ledger-book — my only one!"
When he was left alone he found himself still far too weak in body and spirit for artistic creation, and so he contented himself with reading the products of his past — all of which seemed remote to him now. He could, in fact, identify himself much more readily with the stained and battered notebook than with such couplets as:
"Ye ask, What eat our merry Band
En Route to lovely MARYLAND?
which seemed as foreign to him as if they were another man's work. Since he had happened to begin with the most recent entry and thence to work towards the front of the book, the last thing he read was a note for his projected Marylandiad, made while his audience with Lord Baltimore (that is to say, Burlingame) was still fresh in his memory: MARYLANDS Excellencies are peerless, it read; her Inhabitants are the most gracious, their Breeding unmatch'd; her Dwelling-places are the grandest; her Inns & Ordinaries the most courteous and comfortable; her Fields the richest; her Courts & Laws the most majestic; her Commerce the most prosperous, & cet., & cet. The note was subscribed, in Ebenezer's own hand, E.C., Gent, Pt & Lt of Md.
He lay back and closed his eyes; his head throbbed from the small exertion of perusing his work. "I'faith!" he said to himself. "What price this laureateship! Here's naught but scoundrels and perverts, hovels and brothels, corruption and poltroonery! What glory, to be singer of such a sewer!"
The more he reflected upon his vicissitudes, the more his anguish became infused with wrath, until at length, despite his weariness, he ripped from the ledger his entire stock of sea-verses, and using the quill and ink provided by his host he wrote on the virgin paper thus exposed:
Condemn'd by Fate, to wayward Curse,
Of Friends unkind, and empty Purse,
Plagues worse than fill'd Pandoras Box,
I took my Leave of Albions Rocks,
With heavy Heart, concern'd that I
Was forc'd my native Soil to fly,
And the old World must bid Good-b'ye.
No sooner were these lines set down than more came rushing unbidden to his fancy, and though he was not strong enough at the time to write them out, he conceived then and there a momentous project to occupy him during the weeks ahead — which, should he find no means of regaining his estate, might well be his last on earth. He would versify his voyage to Maryland from beginning to end, as he had planned before, but so far from writing a panegyric, he would scourge the Province with the lash of Hudibrastic as a harlot is scourged at the public post, catalogue her every wickedness, and expose her every trap laid for the trusting, the unwary, the innocent!
"Thus might others be instructed by my loss," he reflected grimly. "But stay — " He remembered the details of his abuse at the hands of the Poseidon's crew, the rape of the Cyprian, Burlingame's pig, and other indelicate features of his adventure. " 'Twill ne'er be printed."
For some moments he was bitterly discouraged, for this reflection implied a cruel paradox: the very wickedness of one's afflictions can prevent one's avenging them by public exposure. But he soon saw a means to circumvent that difficulty.
"I shall make the piece a fiction! I'll be a tradesman, say — nay, a factor that comes to Maryland on's business, with every good opinion of the country, and is swindled of his goods and property. All my trials I'll reconceive to suit the plot and alter just enough to pass the printer!"
The sequence instantly unfolded in his imagination, and he made a quick prose outline lest it slip away. He could do no more just then; exhausted by the effort, he slept for several hours dreamlessly. However, when he reawakened, the vision was still clear in his mind and what was more, the Hudibrastic couplets wherewith he meant to render it began springing readily to hand. He could scarcely wait to launch into composition: as soon as he was strong enough he left his bed, but only because the writing desk in his chamber was more comfortable to work at; there he spent day after day, and week after week, setting down his long poem. So jealous was he of his time that he rebuffed the curiosity and occasional solicitude of Smith, Sowter, and the kitchen-women; he demanded — and, somewhat to his surprise, received — his meals at his desk, and never left his room except to take health-walks in the late October and November sun. All thoughts of suicide departed from him for the time, as did, on the other hand, all thoughts of regaining his lost estate. He was not disturbed or even curious about the absence of any word from Henry Burlingame. When, a week or ten days after his awakening from coma, his legal wife Susan Warren reappeared at Malden, he thanked her brusquely for her aid in nursing him back to health, but although he understood from the kitchen-women that at Mitchell's and Smith's direction she had become a prostitute exclusively for the Indians, he neither protested her activities or her return to Mitchell on the one hand, nor sought annulment of his marriage on the other.
Malden itself was becoming every day more evidently a gambling house, tavern, brothel, and opium den: Susan brought the brown phials with her from Calvert County, and Mary Mungummory — who, the poet learned, had previously resisted Mitchell's efforts to draw her into his organization — moved in with her entire retinue of doxies and accepted the office of madame of the house. Every night the whole point bustled: planters came from all over Dorset by horse and wagon, and by boat from Talbot County as well, and the house rang with their debauchery. From the mid-county fresh marshes and even the salt marshes of the lower county, twenty and thirty miles to the southeast, Abaco, Wiwash, and Nanticoke Indians came to engage Susan and two of Mary Mungummory's least-favored employees in a tobacco-curing house set aside for the purpose. But Ebenezer walked obliviously past the gaming tables, through the rooms of intoxicated, narcotized, and lecherous Marylanders, and across the tobacco fields where knots of solemn Indians moved toward the curing-house. He soon became a figure of fun among the clients, but their jests met with the same indifference with which he rewarded Susan when, upon his entry into a room, she would follow him with troubled and inquiring eyes.