I am at the end of this book; there are no further leaves to write
upon, but the stubs of that quire I tore out to instruct my friends
in writing. Thus this record must pause until such time as I come
into paper; at which future date I hope also that I shall have more
matter to record.
So do I leave us upon this ship anchored by a smoldering, desolate town, where we have been drifting for more than a month, sickly with the smallpox, which only spreads its infamous depredations. I leave us with the country roused against us, and our liberator and commander reviled. And yet, we shall succeed because we must — we have no choice in the matter — to fight or to submit to the greatest indignities and outrages.
I have, strung about my neck (as it were), lockets with the faces of the dead: a rifleman crushed upon a staircase, a wound through his cheek; black men lying upon the grass; the startled look of a Loyalist I struck; and as, some nights, I view these miniatures aghast, I want some comfortable voice to tell me, “My son, my darling son, you have done what needs be done. This is no crime, but rather valor”; and I should believe that voice.
As I close this volume, I am overtaken with an ache that the most charming and accomplished of mothers shall never read my words, and shall never know of our deeds and the actions upon which Pro Bono and Dr. Trefusis and I are embarked.
In my extreme youth one night, she laid her hand upon my head and read me a Psalm on slavery, a lamentation for the yoke which the people of Babylon had laid upon the shoulders of the children of Israel, and I recall her fingers spread wide upon my bare scalp; and I recall that it was as if she directed my gaze — though she could not speak aloud of enslavement, she set my eyes upon a path; and now I have followed it; and it is a circumstance unspeakable that she shall never sit in the garden while Bono and I run to her and embrace her and babble our tales of heroism; that she shall not see me grow to manhood in this conflict, and shall not know that her son was one of the number of a thousand or howsoever we shall swell who won English freedoms for all.
O spirit; lay your hand upon my brow again.
Speak comfortably to thy son,
OCTAVIAN NOTHING
The Crepuscule, off Norfolk
February 6th, 1776