Redcoat

  Vane turned into the alley which led to his lodgings and had to step aside as a drunken John Andre, reeking of rum, staggered towards the street. “Kit?”

  “It’s me, John. Are you all right?”

  Andre seemed to consider the question. “I’m drunk, but I’m going to Mrs Taylor’s. Best thing to do, Kit, after a defeat. Get drunk and get rogered. Would you care to come?”

  “I’ve given up whores, John.”

  “Good God Almighty.” Andre stared in disbelief at Vane, then turned and shouted at the torchlit street. “He’s in love! He’s in love!”

  “John!” Vane protested.

  “It doesn’t matter, Kit. I’m just drunk. Can you believe the news from Sara … Sara … wherever it is?”

  “No.”

  “Nor I.” Andre found a flask of rum in his tail pocket. “Perhaps it isn’t true. Why don’t you marry the Widow?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “I was going to marry once, did I tell you?”

  “Many times, John.”

  Andre leaned on the alley wall and drank from the flask that he then companionably offered to Vane. “Her name, if you can credit it, was Honora Sneyd.” Andre seemed to be laughing, but Vane suddenly saw that his friend was shaking with drunken tears. “Sneyd!” Andre said. “She had a consumptive’s beauty, Kit. Why do we love the helpless? We should look for strapping girls with thighs like grenadiers, but we always fall for the fragile, God damn us. She threw me over, so God damn her as well. God damn all women. Till the next.”

  “Go to bed,” Vane said.

  “Not to my own,” Andre said with drunken dignity, “not tonight. Tonight, as Miss Shippen shows a modesty I despise, I am for Mrs Taylor’s and you are not.” He sucked at the flask, which now proved empty, so he threw it into the street where it clattered on the flagstones. “Have you asked for the Widow’s hand yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Faint heart never won fair trollop. And if you don’t, Kit, others will. Do not say I did not warn you!” Andre, with a great effort, pushed himself from the wall and staggered into the torchlight.

  Vane ran after him. “What do you mean?”

  Andre, his shoulder seized, turned. “I mean, my dear friend, that we can be made more miserable than worms by women. Yours, my dear Kit, is giving a reception tonight. Were you invited?”

  “A reception?”

  “Music, wine, jollity. Your friend and mine Lord Robert Massedene told me.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Vane twisted away and ran, his feet given speed by the jealousy which, like a flood of bile, poisoned him. He turned on to Market Street, scattering a patrol from his path, and ran towards Martha’s house.

  Where he found the windows blazing with candlelight, and music spilling into the street to enrage a group of Loyalists who were only prevented from taking revenge for this unseemly celebration by the presence of four armed Redcoats who, with stoic faces, guarded the house front.

  Vane climbed the steps and shoved open the unlocked front door. Laughter sounded from the upstairs parlour. Vane pushed open the door in time to hear a toast being announced. “To Saratoga!”

  “To Saratoga!” Perhaps a dozen of the city’s most strident Patriots were in the room which was lit by a shoal of tall white candles. Every guest drank, except for Robert Massedene who, with quiet amusement, watched the proceedings. Three musicians, two violinists and a flautist sat in the window bay. In front of them, proposing the toast, Martha was dressed in a flamboyant dress of scarlet silk that was looped with ribbons to match those in her hair. “Captain Vane! You still have the mud of the marshes on you!”

  “Where I watched men die today, ma’am.” The presence of Massedene had enraged Vane almost as much as this flaunting of a rebel victory.

  “Were they Redcoats who died?” an elderly man, a respected doctor in the city, enquired of Vane.

  “What if they were?” Vane turned savagely on the doctor.

  “I am here because of a British defeat,” the doctor said with cold dignity, “so why should I cease my celebration because of your news?”

  “God damn you!”

  “Enough!” Lord Robert Massedene crossed the room. His voice, when he reached Vane, was low and peaceable. “It really might be better if you left, Kit.”

  Vane knew that his anger trembled on the edge of a duel, and he knew, too, how Sir William’s rare but formidable anger was provoked by duels, so, mastering the rage, he looked at Martha. “Do you wish me to leave, ma’am?”

  “I think you should have a glass of wine, Kit.” She smiled at him and, with her natural and quiet grace, took Vane’s arm and led him into the small breakfast room which lay behind the parlour. She closed the door behind them. “I would have invited you, but I only heard about Saratoga this afternoon.”

  The word was like a knife in Vane’s pride. “You’d invite me to celebrate that?”

  “Why ever not?” Martha seemed amused. “I attend all the celebrations of British prowess, Kit. Would you deny me this one chance of enjoying a Patriot victory?”

  Vane turned away to stare through the window at the lights of the city. “You could hardly expect me to take pleasure in such a thing, but it seems Lord Robert has a more pliant allegiance.”

  “I think not. He informed me of the surrender with great regret, but he was also kind enough to offer his protection to me tonight. You were not available, otherwise, naturally, I should have asked you first. Would you have been as kind as he?”

  Vane turned from the window and, as if with a great effort, said what was dearest to his heart. “I would be kind to you.” He paused, hoping she would reply, and he saw how, in the small candlelight, the shadows made her face mysterious and enchanting so that the thought of losing her was unbearable. “I would be most kind to you, dear Martha.”

  Martha smiled her gratitude. “I too hope we shall be friends, but it should be on the understanding that my opinions will not change, any more, I suspect, that yours will.”

  Vane thought of all the men to whom he had declared his passionate love of this woman, and he thought of the disgrace if he were to lose his status as her particular companion. “I would be more than friends. You know that.”

  Martha paused, then nodded. “I had suspected it, Captain Vane.”

  “And?” Vane, his anger of a moment before quite forgotten, spoke the word with a great yearning.

  It was Martha’s turn to go to the window and stare into the night. Her face was reflected in the darkened pane as she spoke. “I never wanted the British to come to Philadelphia, Kit, and I wept on the day you arrived I should perhaps have fled, but I wasn’t brave enough. I couldn’t bear to think of Lydia and myself being harried pell-mell across Pennsylvania, always wondering if Redcoats would appear in the next uncomfortable little town. So I stayed.” She turned to him. “And I hope, indeed I know, that one day you will leave. Till then I will not willingly make an enemy of a particular man, but nor can I make anything more than a friend of any man who wishes to see my nation defeated.”

  Vane had listened with growing despair and now seized on just one sentence. “We won’t leave. Redcoats will grow old and die in Philadelphia, but we won’t leave!”

  Martha shook her head in gentle contradiction. “You gave up Boston to take Philadelphia. What will you give up to take Charleston? Or to defend the West Indies if the French come into the war? And they will! Today’s news will bring them over the Atlantic because they want the sugar islands! One island is worth the trade of two of these colonies, and London would rather surrender Philadelphia a dozen times than yield Antigua. So you’re already defeated, Kit, you’ve lost! Don’t you understand that?”

  Vane shook his head wearily. “We haven’t lost. We won’t lose!” It was a stubborn declaration of faith, something to cling to as he heard the greater hopes of love sliding away.

  “You’ve lost.” Martha was implacable. “And if you don’t accept it, the loss will be worse. Sir Willi
am knows! He wants peace, and what do you gain by persevering with war?”

  “We shall win,” Vane said obstinately. “We lose now because we’re led by men who wish to be kind to the rebels, but that will change! We’ll bring real soldiers here!”

  “Like you?”

  Vane straightened. “Like me, ma’am. And we’ll win!”

  Martha shook her head sadly. “Dear Kit! You merely want to kill rebels now to salve your pride.”

  “That isn’t true!”

  “Of course it’s true!” This time it was Martha who showed a pang of anger. “You despise us, Kit, and you can’t bear to be beaten by people you despise!”

  “I do not despise you.”

  Martha made an impatient gesture. “You think our taste is blowsy and vulgar. You said so yourself. We lack an aristocracy. You mock our merchants for their opulence. You patronize us, Kit!”

  Vane flinched under her lash. “I never patronize you.”

  “You patronize my people, my city! Do you wonder that so many Americans hate the tyranny of Britain? How would you feel if strangers came by boat to flaunt their so-called superiority in the streets of London?”

  “There’s no tyranny here.”

  Martha sighed as though she were explaining something very simple to a person of slow or obstinate understanding. “It’s the tyranny of ignorance, Kit, and of stupidity, and of unthinking arrogance!”

  “I would think, madam” – Vane was stung into an equivalent scorn – “that colonists dependent on our benevolent protection from the depradations of savages and Frenchmen are not best qualified to be judges of tyranny, stupidity, or arrogance.”

  “There! You see? You patronize me!” Martha’s voice was loud enough to still the hum of conversation in the next room which, almost at once, started again.

  Vane seemed to quiver with anger. However, when he spoke it was not anger that he expressed, but a terrible and wounded plea. For Vane to lose this woman would be to suffer a public rejection and so, in desperation, he checked the rage and sought her pity instead. “I can’t patronize you. I love you!”

  Martha heard the agony, and knew what a hollow hurt soul lurked in this man. He thought the world despised him for his birth, and he sought solace in the trappings of success. Vane, Martha knew, would always want a gaudier uniform than the next man, and a more beautiful woman than his rival. She made her voice as gentle as the music that started to play in the next room. “You do me honour, Kit, but I cannot return your love. However, I will be a friend, as long as you understand that we simply do not need you any more. Not for protection, nor even, though you would scarce believe it, as arbiters of our infant taste.”

  But Vane, stung by her rejection, did not hear the kindness in her voice. “You were quick enough to seek our help when your brother needed rescue! How American that is! To declare your self-sufficiency, then whine for help whenever a painted savage shows his face among the trees!”

  “That’s stupidity, Kit, and you know it!” Martha’s voice was sharp. “I asked for help because it was in the British power to give it. It was the British who put Jonathon into that hospital!”

  “And who released him! And what gratitude did we have?”

  “Dear God!” Martha closed her eyes in exasperation. When she opened them there was nothing but scorn in their dark gaze. “What pathetic hopes, Captain Vane, you did have of that night.”

  Vane saw that all his hopes had been doomed, that even before this night they had been doomed, and that all Martha had ever wanted was a red-coated sleeve to ward off the enmity within a Loyalist city. He saw too that she pitied him, and that realization sparked the anger he had tried to conceal. “Damn you, madam.”

  Martha stepped back and opened the door which led to the servants’ back staircase. “It seems we are not to be friends, captain. Good-night. Please don’t call again.”

  “God damn you!” Vane snatched up his cocked hat and slammed his way down the stairs and into the street. He barged through the small crowd outside and thought he heard a peal of mocking laughter come from the house behind.

  A cold night wind came from the dark river. Somewhere a dog barked and a child cried. Clouds, edged with silver, sailed before the moon. Sentries’ boots echoed from Chestnut Street and the glare of their torches flickered long shadows from the pavements’ stanchions. Vane walked slowly, blindly, not knowing where he walked, nor caring. He had been rejected. He had been scorned and spurned and pitied, and the desire for revenge was pure and fierce.

  A whore lurched out of a shop doorway. “Colonel? Colonel?” They called every officer colonel. “Lonely?”

  “Get out of my way!” Vane’s rage exploded. He backhanded the woman, hurling her on to the wooden shutters of the store. Christopher Vane, come to Philadelphia, had met defeat and a woman’s laughter seemed to echo in the night behind him. There would be no peace with such people till victory had forced its price from their defiance. Captain Christopher Vane, in this inchoate war that spluttered along a coastline, had found his enemy and she had slashed his pride, for which offence, Vane swore, he would one day see her grovel as he, this night, had pleaded for her kindness, and been rejected.

  Twenty-Two

  The Revd MacTeague, knowing that all Loyalist hopes had been dealt a savage blow by the extraordinary events in the northern wilderness, chose Ecclesiastes 7, verse 6 as his text for the next Sunday. “For as the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of the fool: this also is vanity.” The unseemly joy, he preached, with which a few in the community had greeted the sad happenings at Saratoga, was of no more account than a burning thornbush. Their vanity would be punished and their cackling joy turned into lamentation. But it was a sermon of small comfort to Loyalists whose belief in the invincibility of the king’s army had been so broken.

  Hunger added its misery to Loyalist defeat. The cargo ships, still barred from the city by the rebel forts, languished in the Delaware Bay while the convoys of army wagons, dragged from the Chesapeake Bay across roads that had been turned into morasses of mud by the autumn rains, could not bring a tenth of the food the city needed. Indeed the wagons’ priority was powder and shot for the siege guns, not food for hungry bellies, and so the city’s larders emptied and prices doubled. Some produce arrived from the countryside, but many farmers were scared of the rebel patrols that willingly enforced George Washington’s decreed punishment of two hundred and fifty lashes for any man or woman caught trading with the enemy. Such farmers, unwilling to sell their food for the paper money of the rebels, hid their harvests until the red-coated forage parties arrived with British gold.

  The Revd MacTeague, invited to dine with Abel Becket some two weeks after the dreadful news of Saratoga, picked moodily at the salt pork. “I cannot conceive how these disasters could have happened, truly I cannot.”

  “The Calvinists,” Becket said darkly, “intimate divine intervention.”

  “Watermelons were the cause of Saratoga!” Hannah Becket declared.

  “Watermelons, ma’am?” The Revd MacTeague was accustomed to Mrs Becket’s frequent references to food, but he failed to make any cogent connection between the disaster at Saratoga and watermelons.

  “It is an incontrovertible fact, Mr MacTeague, that watermelons provoke the fever. The most eminent physicians will assure you of it! It is my belief that the rebels arranged for General Burgoyne’s men to partake of watermelons!”

  The minister sensibly chose not to argue with such wisdom. “It sounds most plausible, ma’am.”

  “Not that a watermelon could be had here,” Hannah Becket, an ample woman, was now well launched on her favourite topic, “even if a body had a taste for one! What are we to do for food? Salt tongue at three shillings a pound! Buckwheat almost gone! Cod, none! Are we to live on mere aspirations?”

  “The forts will be taken,” her husband said.

  “So you say, and so we pray, but molasses? None. Cheese? Mere shreds! A shilling a tierce for dried peas
, cone sugar quite gone! Calves’ feet? A very delicacy these days, and I am partial to a jelly.”

  “I saw some very fine cucumbers, ma’am,” MacTeague suggested diffidently.

  “Cucumbers! Cucumbers! Do the British expect us to starve on salad greens?”

  “The forts,” Abel Becket’s voice demanded his wife’s silence, “will fall!” If the forts could not be taken by sudden escalade, they must be starved and cannonaded into submission. For submit they must, or else a score of Philadelphia merchants, among them Becket himself, would be ruined. That prospect, which had been made more gloomy by the disaster at Saratoga, made Abel Becket a poor after-dinner companion to the Revd MacTeague when the two men retired to Becket’s study.

  MacTeague sipped his tea. “Your nephew’s health is much improved.”

  Abel Becket jabbed at the fire which, made of green wood, burned badly. “His future is his own now. He spurned me.”

  “Lesserby disagrees.”

  The mention of his lawyer’s name made Becket wary. “I cannot see why he should involve you …”

  “I am your pastor, as I was your brother’s, and as I am Jonathon’s. I visit Jonathon. At first I despaired of him, but he is improved.”

  Abel Becket was not concerned with Jonathon’s health. “What did Lesserby want?”

  The priest smiled with a false innocence. “Lesserby told me of your discussions with him, and I am now cast in the role of a humble messenger and charged to tell you that, under the terms of your dear brother’s will, there is no legal certainty that Jonathon can be denied his portion of your business.” MacTeague sipped tea again. “He will be twenty-one in April, I believe?”

  “In April.” Becket scowled towards the fire’s weak flames.

  “And he will certainly live till April,” MacTeague said.

  “One prays so,” Becket said automatically.

  “Indeed, indeed.” The soft pummelling from the distant gunfire of the continuing siege on the marshes sounded beyond the window, then there was silence again.