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Saturnalia

HarperCollins Publishers

Chapter One

The Weathervanes Of Boston were pointed north -- the frigates, the angels, the cocks, the cows -- and so, below, was Mr. Baggot. Marching down a dim alleyway, he raised his eyes from the shin-deep snow and gazed with envy at a rooftop rooster. The wooden bird was perched high enough to be sunning itself in the first light of day. While he himself, mused Mr. Baggot, trudged along in perpetual darkness, walking, the lightless lanes of sin, rooting out evil and blasphemy. Such was the life of a tithingman.

It was December of. 1681 and tombstone-cracking cold. Having bested fifty previous winters, Mr. Baggot was undeterred by the freezing gust of wind scouring his face and strode powerfully ahead without pause, parting the gale with his hatchet nose. In one hand he carried a wellworn copy of Spiritual Stepping-Stones for the Young. In the other he carried the symbol of hisoffice, a walnut staff knobbed at one end and bearing a fox's tail on the other. In fulfilling his duties at Sunday's church service, he'd banged the staff's knob on the doltish heads of a variety of squirming, whispering, laughing, face-making, Satan-claimed children, while waking no less than four dozing adults with a tickle of the foxtail. Following this, he'd used it to trip a pair of boys running from the meetinghouse, had reported two men for swearing and one for shamelessly splitting wood on the Sabbath, and yesterday, to his great disgust, had descended into the hellish waterfront taverns in search of disorderly patrons. How far this foul metropolis was from the paradise it had promised! A thought punctuated by the emptying, from above, of a chamber pot directly in his path.

He turned onto King Street and nearly collided with a scissors grinder pushing his wheel. Tinkers, broom makers, fishwives, and wood sellers all sent their cries toward the roof of Heaven. Horses, carts, and rumbling wagons shook the Devil from bed below. Mr. Baggot tramped on, his cloak flappingin the breeze so that he seemed to be constantly changing shape, as if made of black quicksilver., In the distance he glimpsed a pair of ships, sails full, leaving Boston harbor. Closer at hand, he spotted a shop sign in the shape of a book, and girded himself.

Like the town's other tithingmen, he had spiritual charge of ten families, noting with care their attendance at services and testing their chil dren's knowledge of Scripture. Among the homes on his circuit, none distressed him like that of Charles Currie, printer, a man of great knowledge who seemed to prefer the companionship of his books on Sundays to that of his neighbors in church. And among the young under Mr. Currie's roof, none irked him like William, the printer's apprentice. Not because the, boy failed to study, like most -- but because he knew far too much.

Mr. Baggot, entered the printer's front room, causing the shop's bell to tinkle softly. Waiting for his presence to be noted, he sniffed breakfast, heard talking farther within, glanced about at the books, papers, pins, and other sundries for sale, coughed conspicuously, took off his cloak listened to an outburst of general merriment, and finally pounded his staff on the floor.

"Ah, good Mr. Baggot." Mr. Currie's round, reddish face appeared around a doorway. "You find us at breakfast, Will you take some bread and milk?"

"Bread and milk leave me hungry," Mr. Baggot~ replied sternly. "Feeding the soul is my object. Your children's ravenous ones, this morning."

Mr. Currie smiled faintly. "Allow me a moment to instruct their souls to fetch bowl and spoon." Turtlelike, he drew in his head, while Mr. Baggot wondered whether he'd been mocked. He felt his anger smoke, then ignite, ransacked his brains for some revenge on the man, and found himself staring at a calendar for December on the wall. His eyes traveled down to the twenty-fifth and narrowed. In the printer's favor, Mr. Baggot had never known him -- or any but a handful -- to celebrate Christmas in any way, much less with the feasting, dicing, and drinking that marked that reeking day in England. However, the tithingman had heard tell that in this same month of the year Mr. Currie, out of his love for the ancient authors, imitated the Romans of old and observed a Saturnalia, a depraved, pagan festivity in which masters and servants traded places. Was this not far worse than Christmas reveling? The man, he noted, bore closer watching.

Mr. Currie returned, guided Mr. Baggot, down a hall, past the printing room, into the house's living quarters, and left him at a long bench near the hearth upon which perched six children of assorted heights.

"Now then." Mr. Baggot removed the hat from his wispy, wind-tormented red hair and straightened himself to his full six feet. His staff in one hand, he opened his book with the other and paced before the bench.

"Sarah. Who was the oldest man?"

"Methuselah," stated a confident voice.

"James. Who was the most patient man?"

."Job," came the reply.

"Timothy. Who, was the most hard-hearted man?"

"Judas," lisped Mr. Currie's youngest son.

The tithingman rapped his head with his staff. "Pharaoh!" he corrected. "As sure as you're the most hardheaded boy in all Boston!"

Mr. Baggot paced, stopping before William, Mr. Currie's fourteen-year-old apprentice. He was tall and thin as a spring shoot, growing up through and out of his black breeches and white shirt. The tithingman stared. at him in silence. How very English he looks, he reflected. A wig on his head, stockings on his calves, pewterbuckled shoes on his feet How avidly he reads. How well he speaks. How universally admired he is. And how black is his barbarous heart, he added.

Excerpted from Saturnaliaby Paul Fleischman Copyright © 1990 by Paul Fleischman. Excerpted by permission.
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