Redcoat Read online

  One of the staff officers took the enemy flag from Ensign Trumbull and, wheeling his horse, rode with the banner towards his companions. He passed close to Sam and, as he did, so the new sun flecked the horizon with a dazzling brilliance to slant one long lance of brightness that struck the enemy flag and made it luminous. Sam, momentarily shadowed by the great flag, flinched from the glow of its thick red and white stripes that carried a circle of white stars on a blue upper quadrant. Then the officer went and Sam blinked as if to rid his eyes of the flag’s gaudy dazzle.

  The Bloodybacks had come in the night and taken steel to the sleeping Yankees. Now Sam Gilpin, Redcoat, lay on the grass and slept.

  Two

  In the small hours of the morning of Friday 19 September 1777, Jonathon Becket woke to the startled belief that the world was ending.

  It was a forgiveable mistake for, on the previous Sunday, the Revd MacTeague had preached on the Second Coming and thus, when the lights flamed sudden in the night streets and screams woke people from their beds, there were many Philadelphians who believed, like Jonathon, that the bright-winged millions of God had come to cleanse the world of sin.

  Trumpets sounded and hooves echoed in the city’s long straight thoroughfares. Citizens fumbled with tinders and steel to discover that it was only the first hour of the day, yet the commotion was like that of the Apocalypse. Children cried, and flames made lurid patterns on housefronts where shutters were thrown back as people leaned out to shout for news.

  The news proclaimed that the city was not threatened by the world’s ending, but by the British army. Horsemen had been glimpsed crossing the Schuylkill at the Upper Ferry. The Redcoats were coming, and Philadelphia panicked.

  The truth, which was lost in the night’s alarm, was that a rebel cavalry patrol had been searching the river’s western bank and had been mistaken for the invading British, and so the Patriots fled in the darkness.

  Men who were delegates to the rebel Congress hastily threw their papers and valuables into travelling cases. The Liberty Bell was already gone from the State House, and the papers of the State Library and the money from the Public Loan Office had been sent to hiding in the western valleys of Pennsylvania. And now the Patriots, the architects of revolution who had argued and fashioned the Declaration of Independence, followed.

  Coaches were harnessed and brought to house doors. Furniture was wrestled down street steps and laden on to wagons. Women cast anxious glances westward, fearing to see the red coats come into the flamelight. Philadelphia had been appointed the home of the revolution, the capital of the new American nation, and its godly citizens feared that the coming of the enemy would be like the descent of the Philistines on to the Children of Israel; soldiers greaved in brass, bearded and terrible, would come for their revenge, and so the whips cracked in the dark and the children wept.

  There was terror and haste, yet not every citizen feared the Redcoats. There were Loyalists in Philadelphia, Tories who were eager for the restoration of British rule, and in their Loyalist houses the apprehension of the British coming was mingled with a prayerful relief that at last the rebel Whigs were being ousted. Abel Becket, whose warehouses dominated the city’s wharves, was one such Loyalist who, in the night’s alarum, barked orders to his house servants. “Lock the back gate! Put torches in the yard and by the street steps! Lively, man!”

  He was a tall man with cropped black hair that was usually disguised by a neatly curled white wig. He was thin, and the passage of fifty years had made his face haggard, but his eyes still showed an almost youthful intelligence. Abel Becket was a merchant, and, just as his guile had steered him through the treacherous shoals of recent political debate, so his wealth had allowed him to survive the thin years of rebel rule in the city. He had traded with rebels, for there had been no other choice in the last three years, but the trading had given him no pleasure, and little profit.

  “Upstairs, miss! Upstairs!” Abel Becket despatched a frightened kitchen maid to the upstairs parlour where Mrs Becket waited with prayer book and bible. As the girl went up the staircase, so Jonathon Becket, hastily dressed in black, limped down to the hallway where Abel Becket made his preparations for the British arrival.

  “Uncle!” Jonathon dragged his right foot, swollen and twisted like some leather-clad monstrosity, behind him. “What’s happening, sir?”

  “The British are crossing the Schuylkill. The rebel scum are running, and God alone knows what mischief they’ll fetch on us in their panic.” There was an exultation in Abel Becket’s voice, not in anticipation of mischief, but because he was seeing the defeat of the rebels.

  “Who’s at the warehouse?” Jonathon asked.

  “I’ve sent for Woollard.”

  “I’ll go, sir.”

  “It isn’t safe.”

  For answer Jonathon pulled back his coat to reveal a pistol’s butt protruding from his belt. For a second Abel Becket was torn between the safety of his nephew and the fate of the expensive goods stacked in the warehouse. Cupidity won, and he dragged back the bolts of the front door. “Go carefully.”

  “I will, sir.” Jonathon hid the pistol, then hobbled into a scene that was almost as astonishing as his waking vision of the Second Coming. Like a hive brutally kicked apart, Market Street was in chaos. A wagon was being whipped away from the opposite pavement. The wagon was loaded as high as the hay barges that came down the Delaware in late spring; beds and cupboards, tables and chairs, chests and cases, all were lashed crazily high on the wagon’s bed, but, as Jonathon watched, a spinet jerked loose from the hastily knotted ropes, bounced on the backboard, and shattered in a splintering discord on the hard-rutted mud. A carriage, its four horses being flogged to speed, bumped a wheel over the broken fragments of inlay and ivory. No one seemed to notice in their desperate hurry to escape.

  Jonathon plunged eastwards through the crowds. He heard snatches of hectic conversation. British cavalry was said to be plundering the Northern Liberties, Hessians had started burning Southwark, while the Redcoats were drowning those citizens who attempted to escape across the Delaware. The crowd reacted to each rumour by flowing in a new direction to escape the imagined threat. On the corner of Second Street, where most of the carriages and wagons were being funnelled north towards the Frankfort Road, a preacher was shouting that men should repent, that God would spare the city if enough righteous men would bear witness, but the man’s cries were drowned by the rumble of wheels and the neighing of frightened horses. Jonathon, his face showing the pain of walking, struggled through the chaos.

  He had been crippled at birth twenty years ago when, to his mother’s screams, he had been dragged into the candlelight with a twisted right leg that would never grow into full strength. His mother had died, but Jonathon, to his father’s astonishment, had lived. There were times when people even forgot that Jonathon was crippled. His leg might be twisted and club-footed, but Jonathon had ever refused sympathy. If he could not run, then he could ride a horse as well as any man and better than most. He might limp when he walked, dragging the foot in a dipping gait, but he stood tall and had his family’s thin and handsome looks.

  Now, amidst the panic, Jonathon was jostled by the crowd, and once he fell heavily into a shop doorway, but he pressed doggedly onwards. Not every Patriot could find a wagon or coach to carry them clear of royal revenge, and Jonathon, as he neared the city’s wharves, found himself part of a flood of refugees who sought the Delaware’s ferries that could take them to New Jersey. A small child, screaming and lost, shrieked its despair from a doorway in Front Street and Jonathon lifted the girl high into the glow of a bracketed torch and bellowed for someone to recognize the child. His voice stilled the crowd momentarily. “Whose child? Whose child?”

  A woman fought back against the tide of families and reached for the girl. Jonathon cut the woman’s thanks short, and turned instead into an alley which cut down to the wharves. The doors to his uncle’s warehouses, he saw, were still padlocked and inviol
ate, but the big flat-bottomed shallop which was tied to Abel Becket’s quay was swarming with men who, unfamiliar with the boat’s rigging, hampered the crew’s effort to set sail.

  “Stop!” Jonathon had worked four years on the waterfront and had a voice that could carry to a ship in the river’s centre.

  A man, wrestling with the complicated spring which held the shallop against the river’s current, recognized the limping figure in the flickering torchlight. “He’s a Becket. Ignore the bastard!”

  “The British are coming …”

  “Hurry!”

  Their voices rose in a tumultuous and fearful babble. Women and children, their faces wan in the light of the shallop’s lanterns, huddled about the main mast. More crewmen, wakened from their tavern beds, hurried down the quay.

  “I said stop!” Jonathon dragged the pistol from his belt, pointed it high into the sky, and pulled the trigger. The gun hammered the night and the jolt of its recoil rammed down Jonathon’s arm. The men on the boat, appalled by the sudden noise, stared at him. Jonathon, as the echo thrown from the warehouse walls died across the river, spoke calmly. “That shallop is to carry gunpowder to General Washington’s army. The powder’s been paid for. If you want to take the boat, then you take the powder with it. I’ve just come from the city and there are no British there yet. If they do come, then you can cast off. But if you don’t take the powder, then the British will capture it and use it against you.” He pushed the pistol back into his belt. “Besides, that boat’s unballasted, so you’ll all drown unless you put some weight into her.”

  Jonathon’s last words, or perhaps his voice which was so calmly confident, persuaded the refugees. Jonathon kept his authority over the reluctant men by giving quick and confident orders. The lanterns with their treacherous flames were moved fore and aft. Planks were rigged from quay to shallop, then the vast barrels were rolled out of the warehouse, across the quay, and lowered with a slung whip into the hold. Each barrel held four hundred pounds of best gunpowder, all of it captured from a British merchantman taken the previous autumn by a privateer from the Chesapeake Bay. Jonathon had bought the powder, then resold it at a fair profit to the rebel army. It was to rescue the precious cargo, and keep it from the British, that Jonathon had come into the hectic night.

  The barrels rumbled over the stones, then down the planks, and no Redcoats appeared to interrupt the work. Instead, a huge hulk of a man with shoulders humped like a plough-ox lumbered down the quay and demanded to know who had authorized the lading.

  “I did.” Jonathon had been standing in the shadows on the shallop’s deck, but now, with his odd sideways gait, he shuffled back to the quay.

  Ezra Woollard’s anger was checked as he saw his master’s nephew limp into the light. “Does your uncle know you’re doing this, Master Jonathon?”

  “He sent me.”

  Jonathon’s reply was equivocal, and Woollard, sensing the evasion, scowled. “Why give the bloody stuff away?”

  “Because it’s paid for.”

  “But if the British come, Master Jonathon, we can sell it to them as well. Two payments for the same goods?”

  “The Congress has paid for it, and the Congress shall have it.” Jonathon was tall, but he seemed dwarfed by the massive Woollard, Abel Becket’s wharfmaster and foreman. Like Woollard, Jonathon worked for Abel Becket, but in a few months Jonathon would enter into his inheritance and become a part-owner of the Becket business. Until then Ezra Woollard treated Jonathon with a careful mixture of contempt and respect that made clear the foreman’s resentment that, in time, this crippled young man would become his master.

  “Or would you be sending the powder away,” Woollard asked snidely, “because your sympathies have been turned by a woman?”

  Jonathon did not rise to the taunt. “You’re standing in my way, Mr Woollard.”

  “Oh, my lord!” Woollard gave an ironic bow, then stepped back to watch the last barrels being trundled across the quay’s cobbles. The crowds by the ferry piers were lessening and the flames of the torches were being dimmed by the first faint grey of dawn. The shallop’s captain thanked Jonathon. “I almost lost my ship. Thank you.”

  “You almost lost the powder.”

  “And that’s more precious these days. I don’t know when I’ll see you again, Master Becket, but God bless you.”

  The heavy shallop warped into the stream and, its sails unleashed, caught the dawn wind to carry its burden northwards. Jonathon, as he watched the boat’s wake glimmer silver against the dark water, felt a sudden weariness as heavy as the cargo he had just saved from the British.

  Woollard was gone. Jonathon locked the warehouse, then, for a moment, he stared hopefully across the river; but whatever he wished to see did not appear and so he turned his back on the water. His right foot dragged as he walked. There were times when he hated the sound of the foot’s scraping, when he despised himself for the twisted mockery of a leg, but he hated others to offer pity or even to notice that he was not whole.

  The streets were quieter now. The Patriots had fled, and the Loyalists, sensing that the British army was not to come after all, explored the dawn-lit city to see who had stayed and who had gone. The Tories had always outnumbered the Whigs in Philadelphia, and Jonathon realized, with a shameful pang, that his city would welcome the British occupation.

  He limped to the corner of Market and Fourth where he climbed the steps of a tall stone house. The shutters were open, indicating that the household was awake, so Jonathon hammered on the door. He yawned, then glanced westwards as if expecting to see red coats where the city’s streets faded into the countryside. Nothing moved there. The only sounds in the city now were the crowing of cocks and the lowing of cows waiting to be milked. There had been a time when dawn in Philadelphia had been a cheerful cacophony of church bells, but the rebels had taken all the bells to be melted down for cannons. Jonathon turned to the door and banged the brass ring again.

  The door opened as he knocked. “My God, you’re early!” Martha Crowl grimaced at the bright and slanting sunlight. “I haven’t seen the dawn since my wedding night, and I prayed then never to see it again. Do come in, dear brother.”

  Jonathon stumped behind Martha to her upstairs parlour. “I half expected you to have left.”

  “And leave all these pretty things to be mauled by a Redcoat?” Martha gestured about her parlour that was, indeed, filled with pretty things. A Venetian looking-glass surmounted a mantel of white marble, on which stood a gilded clock flanked by candelabras of delicately fluted silver. Martha’s lawyer husband had bought paintings from Europe; fine paintings of ancient cities and Arcadian landscapes, and he had purchased furniture from the finest cabinetmakers in London. Thomas Crowl had been a man of taste and refinement, and, Martha liked to say, a man considerate enough to die early so that Martha, at twenty-six, was already a widow of fortune. Crowl had also, in addition to his wealth, left Martha with a daughter, Lydia, who was now six years old. “She didn’t wake up,” Martha said, “God knows why. Would you like some tea?”

  “Please.”

  Jonathon sat as Martha crossed to the bellpull. She was as tall as her younger brother, and had the same narrow face which some thought too bony to be accounted beautiful, but Martha compensated with a natural elegance. Her hair, like Jonathon’s, was jet black, but this morning was hid beneath a mob cap. She turned back to her brother. “You look quite filthy.”

  “I’ve been loading eighty barrels of the finest cylinder charcoal powder, saving it from the British.”

  “Who never arrived,” Martha said drily. “Perhaps they won’t come at all now?”

  “Not if General Washington can stop them.”

  “He didn’t last week, did he?” The British, advancing cautiously from their ships in the Chesapeake Bay, had been met by the rebel army at Brandywine Creek, where, once again, General Washington had been outflanked and defeated. It was the old story. Only at Trenton, in the previous winter, had General
Washington won a battle. A thousand Hessian prisoners had been paraded through the city as proof, and the sight had raised the Patriot hope that, at last, their general had discovered the habit of victory. In that hope they had cheered the army on its way to Brandywine, then, a week later, stood in silence as its men, wounded, defeated and sullen, trooped back.

  The Loyalists had been elated while the Patriots felt despair. Martha and Jonathon shared the despair for, though their uncle was a Tory and a Royalist, Martha had married a Whig, and Jonathon had avidly followed the impassioned debates within the city and chosen the rebel allegiance. Now it seemed that allegiance was to be tested because, for the first time since the fighting had begun, the British were coming to Philadelphia.

  Martha surreptitiously watched Jonathon massage his right thigh. “Hurting?”

  “I walked further than usual. There wasn’t time to saddle a horse.”

  “Poor Jonathon.” Only Martha could offer him pity, for, since his birth, she had been his closest companion. Marriage had taken her from his home, then their father had died and Jonathon had become a ward of their uncle, but the closeness of brother and sister had never faltered. Jonathon was no longer a crippled boy who needed protection, but the habit was ingrained into Martha.

  The tea came. Jonathon was sitting on the window seat, staring ruefully at the shingled and tiled rooftops. “Last night was shameful. I never thought to see people so degraded.”

  Martha half smiled. “You are stern, brother.”

  “It was undignified!”

  Martha shrugged. “I’ve no doubt that the British flight from Boston was every bit as shameful.”

  Jonathon gave a swift smile to acknowledge the consolation, then leaned back against the folded shutters. “Do you think we can win?”

  “You’re not usually in the habit of asking foolish questions, unless you believe I’ve been given the gift of prophecy?”