Redcoat Page 10

  “He wants to marry me.”

  “And Jonathon has a way of getting what he wants. It’s the leg. He uses it to blackmail the world.” Martha laughed softly. “He’ll be very uncomfortable as a soldier.”

  Caroline was nonplussed by the sudden change of subject. “I’m sure.”

  “He’s rather like me in some ways,” Martha went on as though Caroline had not spoken. “He likes his comfort. He’s been used to it, you see, and I suppose he deserves it because it can’t be easy dragging that lumpen foot about. I can’t see him giving up the city for the farmer’s life, can you?”

  “No.”

  “And you look, if you’ll forgive me, unsuited to the city?”

  Caroline thought she would rather face Ezra Woollard in a stinking alley with a knife in her hand than face this needling examination. She was determined to bring it to an end with bluntness. “You’re saying we shouldn’t marry?”

  “I would never be so impertinent!” Martha said, quite forgetting that she had told her brother exactly that. “You marry whom you wish, and Jonathon will marry whomsoever he wishes. I don’t believe in liberty, Miss Fisher, just to deny it to my brother. But I’ve been a kind of mother to Jonathon since the day he was born, so can I be forgiven some slight curiosity as to the girl he wishes to make my sister-in-law?”

  “Yes.” Caroline was confused and miserable. She felt she was being blamed for a proposed marriage that was pursued with far more enthusiasm by Martha’s brother than by herself.

  Martha had turned to stare haughtily down at a mounted British officer who talked with a girl on the opposite pavement. “I don’t oppose your marriage,” she said in an oddly strained voice, “because if I do I might lose Jonathon. Isn’t that so?”

  “I don’t know.” Caroline decided the acceptance, though grudging, was better than opposition.

  “And I have yet another reason for desiring your friendship.” Martha still stared down at the officer who flirted with the girl. “I imagine that it will be hard to send letters to men in General Washington’s army now that the Revd MacTeague’s friends have arrived?”

  It was another confusing tack in the conversation, but one Caroline felt far more able to cope with. “I would think so.”

  Martha turned. “But you live across the river, so you can do it safely?”

  “I would think so, yes. So long as the British don’t garrison Cooper’s Point.”

  “Why should they?” Martha, with a true Philadelphian’s arrogance, implied there was nothing worth capturing in New Jersey. “Can you send more than letters?”

  Caroline frowned. “More than?”

  Martha paused, then explained. “I’m asking whether you could send information to General Washington’s army. Information that I might hear and would wish to pass on.”

  For the first time since she had entered the room, Caroline smiled. “I’d be proud to do that.”

  “That’s why I stayed in the city. Oh, I wanted to protect these things!” Martha waved a negligent hand at the silverware and gilded mirrors and varnished paintings. “But I can do more for our cause by sending news out of the city than I ever could by fleeing from it. And you can help me.”

  “I’d like to,” Caroline said.

  “Then, dear Caroline, you must consider yourself as a welcome guest in this house. You are, after all, my prospective sister-in-law.” Martha smiled and held out both hands towards Caroline, who, quite flummoxed by this last sudden change in Mrs Crowl’s demeanour, hesitantly stood and crossed the room. Martha, to Caroline’s astonishment, kissed her. “Don’t make him unhappy.” The words were whispered fiercely.

  “I won’t.”

  “And I won’t be your enemy.” Martha drew Caroline to the window. “For we have enemies enough in the city now, without quarrelling amongst ourselves.” Martha stared down at the British officer and tears ran down her face. She cried because the enemy had truly come and the future suddenly seemed so bleak.

  “It’s the shame of it,” she explained her tears, “the shame of it.” Because Philadelphia, without a shot being fired in her defence by its citizens who had, indeed, welcomed their conquerors with a fawning adulation, had fallen.

  Nine

  Captain John Andre, an elegant and fastidious man, stood in the window of the farmhouse that had been sequestered as Sir William Howe’s Germantown headquarters. He was watching the red-coated infantry camped in the pastures nearest to the house; men who, in their search for firewood and comfort, had wrought such sad destruction on what had once been a lovely orchard. Andre thought what a plague such soldiers were; a contagion of evil, twisted, squat dwarves; the hopeless, the failures, the dregs, the creatures no one else wanted; a tribe of toothless, poxed men with their lumpen, cackling women and their filthy, sly-eyed children. King George’s army. “Soldiers,” he said abruptly, “are such graceless creatures.”

  Christopher Vane, working at a table, smiled. “Did you join the army to remedy that, John?”

  “I joined the army because I was disappointed in love. Most of us do. We’re an army of the damned led by jilted lovers.” Andre turned towards the tallboy where Sir William’s decanters were kept. On his way he gave a glance of mock horror at Vane’s industriousness. “Do you have to work so hard, Kit? You make the rest of us seem positively idle.”

  Vane smiled, but said nothing. He sometimes perceived the other aides as nothing but lounging praetorians, elegant and privileged, all-knowing and supercilious, but it was an opinion he took care to hide lest it soured his determination to prove himself worthy of the kindness that Sir William had shown him. Even now, two weeks after his sudden promotion, Vane could be startled awake by the sheer pleasure of his new captaincy and, as recompense to his patron, no aide worked harder than Vane in these dull, cold dog-days of early autumn; days in which Vane discovered that, as an aide to a commander-in-chief, he could command other men’s respect. Colonels of regiments who, just weeks before, would have disdained Vane’s acquaintance, now sought him out because he could secure them favours from the General.

  The troops, like most of the aides, idled. Lord Cornwallis, the Second-in-Command, had been sent to occupy Philadelphia with a small force, while the main army camped around Germantown to guard the approaches to the city. It was believed that George Washington, smarting under the loss of the rebel capital, might attempt to recapture the city, though many in the army believed, like John Andre, that Washington would do nothing. “Why should he? All he has to do is name another city as the rebel capital. Philadelphia counts for nothing!”

  “America’s largest city?” Vane suggested in mild disagreement.

  “It’s a smaller town than Bristol,” Andre said scornfully, “with far too many churches and a paucity of taverns, despite which my hosts insisted that it was the New Jerusalem. It seemed impolite to disabuse them.”

  “You’ve been there?” Vane was surprised.

  “Before the fighting, yes. Billy has great hopes for it, but for the life of me I can’t see why the rebels should lose heart just because we’ve taken Philadelphia.” Andre, having poured himself a glass of rum, looked over Vane’s shoulder and showed immediate alarm because Vane was working through the commissary accounts, a record of all the headquarters’ expenditures for horses, food, lodgings and necessaries. “For God’s sake,” Andre said, “don’t be too efficient.”

  “Because Sir William’s stealing money?” Vane smiled. “I suppose every general does it, and all I’m doing is hiding it a little more efficiently.”

  “Good God,” Andre stared with grudging admiration at Vane. “You are ambitious!”

  “Is there anything wrong with that?”

  “One should never admit to it.”

  Vane shrugged. “My father lost most of his money before he died, my family is sliding into obscurity, so my only hopes of advancement lie in working hard.” He regretted the words as soon as they were spoken, feeling that they revealed his naked self to a man who might
be a rival. In truth, Andre, a frequent visitor to Sir William’s headquarters, was the friendliest of all the elegant young men who inhabited Vane’s new world. It was Andre who had taught Vane that Sir William’s nickname was Billy, and who now explained that Billy needed the extra money for his expensive American mistress. “Lizzie will be here as soon as the city’s safe, and then you’ll hardly see Billy at all. He’s besotted.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “More beautiful than an angel. Intelligent, too, which is a most unfair conjunction. Her husband’s been fobbed off with a job in New York.”

  “Is Billy married?”

  Andre wondered if he detected a prudish note in Vane’s question. “Not so long as he’s in America.”

  “Ah.” Vane closed the account books as footsteps sounded in the passageway outside. It was dusk, a time when the aides, after recovering from their languid dinner, liked to gather in contemplation of supper. All except Vane were bored, fretted by the necessity to linger in the countryside while the urban delights of Philadelphia were so close. Lord Robert Massedene, heading straight for the decanters, first pronounced his blessing on the room, then offered Vane a glass of claret. “I went to see your new horse, Vane. Very impressive.”

  “He’s fast.” Vane’s duties demanded two horses, and so he had borrowed money to buy a magnificent black stallion with three white socks and a white blaze. Vane had also borrowed money to buy his new uniform complete with its golden aiguillettes.

  “I’m sure he’s fast,” Massedene allowed, “but a little young, perhaps?”

  Vane felt immediately defensive as though, in criticizing the stallion, Massedene was attacking Vane himself. “Young?”

  “He ain’t nagged properly, not for battle,” Massedene said firmly. “One cannon shot, Vane, and that stallion will get the shivers. Cling to your old mare in battle, and find a good man to nag the stallion. Just a word of advice.”

  It was a word of advice that irritated Vane, an irritation that was made more acute by his knowledge that Massedene was right. The stallion was a nervous beast that Vane had no intention of riding in battle until it was properly trained, and thus he found Massedene’s assumption of his ignorance to be gratingly patronizing. He disliked Massedene. Vane resented that the younger man should have such an effortless career, fuelled by his noble birth, while Vane, who perceived himself as an abler man, must struggle for advancement.

  The dislike was accentuated by their opposing views on almost every aspect of the rebellion. Lord Robert Massedene, like John Andre, only wished to see the rebellion ended, and did not much care how that culmination was achieved, so long as there was peace. Vane, like the Hessian interpreter Zeigler, believed that republican sentiment in America could only be stamped out by a military victory.

  It was an argument that continued at that night’s supper. Major Zeigler, coming late to the table, reported to Sir William that a schoolmaster from one of the Pennsylvanian German settlements had come to the Hessian lines and reported that the rebel army was planning to attack the following morning. They would march through the night, the schoolmaster had said, and attack at dawn. Lord Robert Massedene airily dismissed the man’s claim. “Washington won’t dare attack us. One more licking and his men will desert in their thousands!”

  “I think you’re wrong.” Vane rather surprised himself by offering the contradiction. So far he had been a listener rather than a partaker in such discussions.

  Massedene waited with a decanter of port poised in his hand, then shrugged. “Don’t leave us in suspense, Vane.”

  “If our reports are right,” Vane struggled to hide his distaste for the pug-nosed Massedene, “the rebel army outnumbers us for the first time. So I think Washington will attack.”

  “Ah! Reports!” Sir William, presiding over his young men, chuckled. “We had a very reliable report once that the armies of the Lord had been observed descending on a mountaintop in Massachusetts. I believe they had golden wings and carried muskets of jasper? I’m never sure about these reports, Kit.”

  Vane, uncertain whether he was being rebuked, held his ground stubbornly. “I still believe Mister Washington will attack, sir. He has to win a victory to restore his men’s morale.”

  “As he did at Trenton last year.” Andre made the sly dig at Otto Zeigler who, like all Hessians, still smarted at the memory of that Hessian defeat.

  “They surprised us!” Zeigler said defensively. “We were drunk. Every German is drunk at Christmas.”

  Sir William smiled. “At least he can’t surprise us here.” Sir William made the statement with a satisfaction born of his precautions. He had doubled the army’s picquets and, thanks to the happy arrival of three convoys of ammunition, those picquets could now blaze into the night with impunity. Sir William, thus comforted, fondled his dog’s ears.

  John Andre trimmed a candlestick. “I hate to disagree with you, sir, but I think Mister Washington has to attack. Pour encourager les crapauds.”

  “Whenever you drop into French, John, I suspect you of spiflication,” Sir William said.

  “He’ll fight, sir, to draw the French into the war.”

  Sir William shook his head. “I don’t deny that the French would like to embarrass us, John, but why should King Louis encourage republicanism?”

  “And why would the French risk another whipping?” Zeigler asked.

  “Because the French have short memories,” Andre said happily. “Every defeat only encourages them to believe in their own invincibility. It’s a trait they share with Mister Washington.”

  There were appreciative smiles, then Zeigler opined that the French would not enter the war unless it was already won for them, and the rebels stood no chance of winning. They had no capital and soon General Burgoyne would slice New England away from the rest of the colonies and the rebellion would wither on the vine.

  “But the mere threat of French intervention,” Andre said, “might persuade London of the need to make peace.”

  “Or victory,” Vane said.

  “Just peace.” Sir William smiled at Vane. “We can’t win a military victory, Kit. Everyone recognizes that. The army’s only here to force the rebels to the negotiating table.”

  Vane looked in astonishment at Sir William. “We can’t beat them, sir?”

  “Don’t sound so forlorn! Of course we can’t! My dear Kit, we had to abandon Boston to find the forces to take Philadelphia. It takes five thousand men to garrison a city and another five thousand to scour the countryside about that city for food, so we only have sufficient men to hold three cities, perhaps four, in all this gaping wilderness. Then we have to garrison Canada and the Floridas. Dear me, no. It would take a hundred thousand men to defeat the rebellion, and who’ll pay for that, eh? You think the House of Commons will vote the taxes? I assure you they will not, at least not as long as I’m a member of the House!”

  Sir William’s other aides smiled at the shock on Vane’s face. “So you see, Kit,” Andre leaned across the table to pour Vane more port, “the colonists, if they did but realize it, can get everything they want at the negotiating table.”

  “Except their independence,” Massedene added.

  Sir William still watched Vane. “My dear Kit, I fear you’ll have to accept the mathematical logic of war. Our army is too small to take a continent.”

  “War can’t be about mathematics, sir.” Vane, piqued by the defeatism he heard and perhaps emboldened by the port which circled the table so freely, was suddenly fervent. “It’s about men and morale and weather and spirit! God, sir, we’re British! We’re the best goddamned pirates the world ever saw, and we’re worrying about the French? About a nation of dancing masters? Or about the colonists’ sensibilities? There would be no colonies without us. The colonists are like children squawling at their nurse!”

  “Hear, hear!” Zeigler broke the embarrassed silence that followed Vane’s impassioned words. “Break some heads and make some orphans. That’ll empty their damned
bellies of spleen.”

  There was laughter at such Germanic bombast, then Sir William wondered whether Mister Washington had similarly belligerent advisers, and Zeigler demanded that the schoolmaster’s report be taken seriously, and Massedene reminded Sir William that a butcher had brought in a similar tale two days before which had turned out to be false, and Sir William ended the discussion by stating his firm belief that, if the rebel army were marching to the attack, the cavalry patrols would discover it. “So we shall ignore a schoolmaster’s tittle-tattle,” Sir William suggested, “and play a hand of whist instead.”

  More port was opened, the cards broken out, and the candles guttered down to smoking stumps before Vane stumbled up the stairs to the linen store that he shared with Major Zeigler as a bedroom. A stomach ache woke Vane just before dawn and drove him into the garden where he squatted by a quince tree that was wreathed in a new and thickening fog. The whiteness sifted by the house, mingling with the greyness of dawn to hide the chimney pots. A cook whistled in the kitchens, and from the side path came the homely clanging of water pails.

  “Sir! Sir! Are you there, sir?” It was Vane’s servant, Private Smithers, who liked his privileged new life as a headquarters’ servant.

  “Quiet, you rogue! I’m dying.” It occurred to Vane that the morning was quiet, at least of musket fire. God damn all schoolmasters.

  “Eggs, sir?” Smithers, coming from the house, grinned down at his master. “Two eggs for breakfast, sir? Bought them off the gunners.”

  “Who stole them, you fool, but I thank you anyway.” Christopher Vane, who was partial to fried eggs, overcame his initial liquor-induced revulsion. “Fry them and I might be restored to life.”

  A rattle of musketry, muffled by the whiteness, sounded from the north. It was hard to tell how far away the gunfire was, but it faded after a few seconds and Vane assumed that the picquets had merely cleaned out their musket barrels by the quickest expedient. He stood, buttoned his breeches, and groaned as a pang of agony lanced through his head. He was remembering the interminable bottles of port of the previous evening, wondering if he would ever learn moderation.