'I don't know whether I should, or in six months I'l be too wide to go through my own front door,' Douglas said, ruefully surveying his rotund form.
Jeremiah had to sweep off what he was coming to think of as the usual layer of junk to get at his cot. It was saggy and lumpy nowhere near as comfortable as the one he'd had on the Gillen estate. He didn't care.
It was his because he wanted it to be, not because it had to be.
He slept wonderfully. As the months went by, he tried more than once to find a name for his relationship with Alfred Douglas. It was something more than servant, something less than friend.
Part of the trouble was that Douglas treated him unlike anyone ever had before. For a long while, because he had never encountered it before, he had trouble recognizing the difference. The lawyer used him as a man, not as a slave.
That did not mean he did not tell Jeremiah what to do.
He did, which further obscured the change to the black man. But he did not speak as to a half-witted, surly child and he did not stand over Jeremiah to make sure he got things done. He assumed Jeremiah would, and went about his own business.
Not used to such liberty, at first Jeremiah took advantage of it to do as little as he could. 'Work or get out,' Douglas had told him bluntly.
'Do you think I hired you to sit on your arse and sleep?'
But he never complained when he caught Jeremiah reading, which he did more and more often. In the beginning that had been purely practical on Jeremiah's part, so as to keep fresh what Caleb Gillen had taught him.
Then the printed page proved to have a seductive power of its own.
Which is not to say reading came easily. It painfully taught Jeremiah how small his vocabulary was. Sometimes he could figure out what a new word meant from its context. Most of the time, he would have to ask Douglas.
''Eleemosynary?'' The lawyer raised his eyebrows.
'It's a fancy word for 'charitable.'' He saw that meant a nothing to Jeremiah either, simplified again: ' 'Giving to those who lack.' What are you looking at, anyhow?'
Jeremiah held up a law book, wondering if he was in trouble.
Douglas only said, 'Oh,' and returned to the brief a he was drafting.
When he was done, he sanded the ink dry, set the paper aside, and pulled a slim volume from the shelf (by this time, things were easy to find).
He offered the book to Jeremiah. 'Here, try this. You have to walk before you can run.'
'The Articles of Independence of the Federated Commonwealths and the Terms of Their Federation,' Jeremiah read aloud.
'Al else springs from those,' Douglas said. 'Without - them, we'd have only chaos, or a tyrant as they do these days in England.
But go through them and understand them point by point, and you've made a fair beginning toward - becoming a Iawyer.'
Jeremiah stared at him. 'There's no nigger lawyers in Portsmouth.' He spoke with assurance; he had gotten to know the black part of town well.
It boasted scores of preachers, a few doctors, even a printer, but no lawyers.
'I know there aren't,' Douglas said. 'Perhaps there should be.'
When Jeremiah asked him what he meant, he changed the subject, as if afraid he had said too much.
The book Douglas gave Jeremiah perplexed and astonished him at the same time. 'This is how the government is put together?' he asked the lawyer after he had struggled through the first third.
'So it is.' Douglas looked at him keenly, as if his next question was to be some kind of test. 'What do you think of it?'
'I think it's purely crazy, begging your pardon,' Jeremiah blurted.
Douglas said nothing, waiting for him to go on. He fumbled ahead, trying to clarify his feelings: 'The censors each with a veto on the other one, the Popular Assembly chose by all the free people and the senators by-I forgot how the senators happen.'
'Censors and commonwealth governors become senators for life after their terms end,' Douglas supplied.
Jeremiah smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand.
'That's right. And the censors enforce the laws-and lead the armies, but only if the Senate decides to spend the money the armies need. And it's the Popular Assembly that makes the laws (if the Senate agrees) and decides if it's peace or war It in the first place. If you ask me, Mr.
Douglas, I don't think any one of 'em knows for certain he can fart without checking the Terms of Federation first.'
'That's also why we have courts,' Douglas smiled.
'Why do you suppose the Conscript Fathers arranged things this way?
Remember, after we won our freedom from England, we could have done anything we wanted.'
Having had scant occasion to think about politics before, Jeremiah took a long time to answer. When he did, all he could remember was the discussion Charles Gil en and ' Harry Stowe had had the spring before.
'For the sake of argufying?' he guessed.
