John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

" 'Tis I, Joan Toast," he said uncertainly. " 'Tis Eben Cooke and John McEvoy. ."

Joan made a sound and clutched at the doorjamb; the lantern slipped to the ground and was extinguished. A man's voice came from the vestibule behind her. "What the Devil!"

"Haply we'd better flee, after all," McEvoy suggested. But Ebenezer, no longer even shivering, stood transfixed in his original position.

For centuries upon centuries, so it seemed to Ebenezer, he had sojourned in the realm of Lucifer, where in penance for Lust and Pride he underwent a double torture: the first was to be transferred at short intervals from everlasting flames to the ice of Cocytus, frozen by the wings of the King of Hell himself; the second, less frequent but more painful, was to see commingled and transfused before his eyes the faces of Joan Toast and his sister Anna. Joan would bend near him, her face unmarred and spirited as it had been in London: her dress was fresh, her pox vanished; her eyes were bright and tender — indeed, her face was not hers at all, but Anna Cooke's! Then even as he watched his sister's face he saw her eyes go red and dull, her teeth rot in the gums, her flesh go raw with suppurating lesions — until at last, with Joan Toast's face, she became Joan Toast, whereupon the cycle would sometimes recommence. The metamorphosis invariably stole his breath; he would choke and cry out, thrash his arms and legs about in the fire or the ice, and gibber blasphemies as obscure as Pluto's "Pap è Satan aleppe. ." It is not difficult to imagine, therefore, with what joy he found Anna quite unaltered when at length he opened his eyes and saw her sitting near his bed, reading a book. The very magnitude of his relief thwarted its expression; he fell at once into profoundest dreamless sleep.

Upon his second awakening he was more rational; he realized that he had been ill and delirious for some time — whether a day or a month he could not guess — and that now his fever was gone. It pleased him no end to see that his sister was still in attendance at his bedside, since now he was quite able to address her.

"Dearest Anna! How very kind of you to nurse me. ."

He spoke no further, both because his sister, weeping joyfully, rushed from her chair to embrace him, and because he suddenly understood how incredible it was that she should be there, apparently safe and sound!

"I'faith, where am I?" he whispered. "How is't thou'rt here?"

"Too great a story!" Anna sobbed. "Thou'rt home in Malden, Eben, and God be praised thou'rt back among the living!" Without releasing him she called through the open doorway, "Roxanne! Come quick! Eben's awake!"

"Roxanne as well?" Ebenezer closed his eyes to gather strength.

"Thou'rt weak, poor thing! Marry, if you but knew how I wept when I learned what Captain Avery had done, and how I yearned to die with you, and how I feared you'd perish here at Malden and spoil the miracle — i'God, 'tis too much to tell!"

Mrs. Russecks and Henrietta came in from the hall, neither evidently the worse for their ordeal, and when their initial rejoicing subsided, the poet learned the circumstances of their escape.

" 'Twas an act of God, nor more nor less," Mrs. Russecks declared simply. "How else account for't? Long Ben Avery is Benjamin Long of Church Creek, my first and long-lost lover!" Immediately after dispatching the three male prisoners, she said, the privateer had summoned the women aft for the avowed purpose of taking his pleasure, but as it turned out, they suffered no more than a few prurient remarks, for upon learning first her Christian name and then, in response to closer inquiry, her maiden surname, his attitude had changed altogether: he had apologized for having thrown the men overboard, expressed his hope that they would reach Sharp's Island safely, and at the risk of his own life changed course for the mouth of the Severn, where he had bid them adieu and returned to his own ship, leaving Captain Cairn to ferry them singlehanded to Anne Arundel Town!

"We don't know 'twas Benjamin Long," Henrietta admitted. "He'd not answer Mother's questions. But I can't account for his behavior otherwise — "

"Of course it was my Benjy," Mrs. Russecks said. "The dear boy ran off to sea thirty years ago and turned pirate. 'Twas purely out o' shame he'd not own up to't." On this point she was calmly impervious to argument, and despite the staggering unlikelihood of the coincidence, Ebenezer had to admit that he could think of no hypothesis to account more reasonably for Long Ben Avery's sudden charity. He sat up to embrace them all by turns, and his sister again and again, and then lay back exhausted. His sojourn in Hell, he now learned, had actually lasted four days, during which he had hung in the balance between life and death; McEvoy and Bertrand had also been bedridden from the effects of exposure, though not comatose. The former was now quite recovered, but Bertrand, whom they had not located in the barn until the morning after, was still in grave condition.

"Thank Heav'n they're alive!" Ebenezer exclaimed. "What of Father, and Henry Burlingame, and the cooper? Do I hear them belowstairs?" Indeed, from the rooms below came the sound of several men's voices, apparently in argument.

"Aye," Anna said. "The fact is they're all under house arrest till the matter of our estate is settled! Governor Nicholson is much alarmed about the rebellion and the opium traffic, and hath put Cooke's Point under a sort of martial law till your recovery. In the meantime, everyone accuses everyone else, and no man knows whose title is valid." Directly upon their arrival in Anne Arundel Town, she explained, Captain Cairn and they had gone to the Governor's house, roused him from bed despite the hour, and reported as much as they could piece together of their kidnaping, the activity on Bloodsworth Island, and the vicious enterprise of which Malden had apparently become a regional headquarters. Thanks to the mention of the John Smith papers and Captain Cairn's reputation as a sober citizen of St. Mary's, Governor Nicholson had accepted their report at face value: two armed pinnaces had been dispatched in pursuit of Captain Avery's Phansie, and the President of the Council himself, Sir Thomas Lawrence, had set out with the ladies for Cooke's Point before dawn, empowered by the Governor to act as his proxy in any matters involving the welfare of the Province.

"And marry," Henrietta laughed, "what a jolly time we've had since!" Andrew Cooke, she declared, had suffered a series of such great and ambivalent surprises that for a time they had feared for his sanity: to begin with, his joy at finding Ebenezer alive had given way at once to wrath and no small embarrassment — the latter occasioned by his having sworn to all and sundry that "Nicholas Lowe," who in truth had befriended him a fortnight previously and told him that Ebenezer was dead, was the real Ebenezer Cooke, and that the so-called Laureate of Maryland who had given Cooke's Point away was a gross impostor. How had his dismay been compounded, then, when in the space of twenty-four hours he had learned that his "son" was apparently a highly placed agent of the Governor's; that Anna had been captured and freed by the notorious Long Ben Avery; and — perhaps most disconcerting of all — that she had brought with her his old mistress Roxanne Edouard and a young lady alleged to be his natural daughter!

"Beside these wonders," Henrietta said, "such trifles as the Bloodsworth insurrection are beneath his attention! Really, Brother Eben, 'tis a droll fellow we have for a father!"

"Henrietta!" Mrs. Russecks scolded. "Let us hasten to tell Sir Thomas that Mister Cooke is himself again, and will soon be strong enough to speak with him." She kissed the poet quite maternally. "Thank God for that!"