Redcoat

  The kitchen’s warmth became welcome as the days became colder. Winter’s promise was in the great skeins of geese, their wings filling the air with a feathered beat that stretched across the autumn sky. Each day the flocks winged southwards and, at dusk, they dropped in unnumbered thousands to the marshes where the rebel forts still defied all Sir William’s efforts.

  Since the repulse of the attacks, the river fighting had become grimmer. A floating bridge, made with Becket’s timber, was thrown across the Schuylkill at Middle Ferry, and wagons carried new supplies, new ammunition, and new men down to the marshes. Heavy guns, slung off warships, were taken to the siege. Floating batteries were made, then so loaded with cannon that they sank and had to be raised and strengthened before they could be towed to the shoals from which they would open their devastating fire upon Fort Mifflin. New mortars were bedded on the dikes to arc shells into the defences.

  The marsh reeked of powder smoke. Men died in waist-deep water. More guns were fetched, then yet more guns had to be dragged through the ever colder October days. No one in the city could remember an October so cold, nor a year when the leaves glowed so prettily.

  The fever became worse. In the city soldiers shivered in damp huts and their dead bodies were buried in a common grave with their enemies who perished in the inadequate hospitals. Food grew scarcer. Some country folk, willing to risk General Washington’s two hundred and fifty lashes, brought corn and hogs through the defence lines. But there was never enough food. Firewood was scarce. Plunderers, in search of furniture to burn, broke into empty houses, and musket shots cracked in the city streets as the provosts tried to stop the thieves. And each succeeding day brought colder winds and smaller fires. Sir William’s lavish revels might distract the city’s wealthy, but the mass of people, like the common soldiers, suffered.

  The month’s ending was marked by gales that shrieked over the marshes and tore shingles from roofs in the city. The last bright leaves of autumn were whirled into the mud. On 25 October, the seventeenth anniversary of King George III’s accession, a solemn service of thanksgiving for the monarch’s long reign was held, but the Revd MacTeague’s voice was drowned by the howling of eldritch winds about St Paul’s. The river was whipped to whitecaps. The pontoon bridge across the Schuylkill broke and its vast boats drifted downstream amidst the shattered planking, while, on the marshes, the wind drove salt water over the gunweakened dikes to drown the batteries and turn the powder barrels into casks of grey and freezing sludge.

  November brought calm, but with the calm came frosts that made the brittle grass of the wetlands into an expanse of shining, white spikes. Men shivered and watched the cat ice creep across puddles, and wondered if the river was swirling more slowly, ready to lock the city up in ice and bring starvation to a garrison. The merchants, cursing the few men who stubbornly held two shattered fortresses, regretted the monies spent on cargoes for England and wondered whence would come the credit to see them through a winter.

  Sam prospered in the suffering city. His skill with horses saw to that, for it was a rare day on which some sick animal was not brought to Sam’s stable. Even one of Sir William Howe’s horses, a bay stallion which had the colic and of which Sir William had entirely despaired, was brought to Sam and cured. For other horses he cut corns from tender hooves that he afterwards treated with butter of antimony. He boiled linseed into a jelly for sick beasts, and even remade saddles for officers who galled their horses’ backs. Captain Vane watched him reset a saddle tree one afternoon. “What do you do with all the money, Sam?”

  The money was all in a leather bag hidden beneath a loose stone of the kitchen floor, but Sam was too fly to admit its existence. “I don’t get no money, sir. Miserable skinflints, you officers.”

  Vane laughed. As the gossip about Vane and Martha died, then was forgotten, so the old ease between master and servant had returned, for it was hard for two men to live in such close conjunction without affability, particularly for Captain Vane, who now used Sam for a duty which far exceeded the usual demands of an officer on his man. That extra duty which made Sam so intimate with Captain Vane’s secrets was, Sam noted, a direct consequence of the Widow’s rejection of Vane. For, as the nights grew colder, Vane would send Sam to the city’s most fashionable brothel on William’s Alley with orders to bring back a girl. “You know the sort I like, Sam. No insipid blondes.”

  On one such night, when the stars were a cold brightness above the dark streets, Sam was sent on his usual errand. He carried a torch, for Sir William had ordered that any man found after dark without a torch was to be deemed a plunderer and, if such a man would not halt on demand, he was to be shot.

  It was freezing, but Sam had a hooded watchcoat and thick gloves. He knocked on the door of the discreetly shuttered house, and shivered as the maid let him into the elegantly furnished hallway. “Cold as bloody Muscovy out there.” Sam rolled the torch on the outer steps to extinguish the flames.

  “Who is it?” a voice spoke from the parlour.

  “Captain Vane’s man,” the maid replied, and the parlour door immediately opened.

  A short, cheerful and motherly woman stood there, her ringed hands raised in benediction. “Sam! How very chilled you look. Come inside, child. Thank you, Marie!” Mrs Taylor, like Tom Evans, had developed an affection for the ever willing and helpful Sam who had dosed and steamed the strangles out of one of her carriage horses. “How is the Captain?” she now asked.

  “He’s bad-tempered, ma’am. He hates the cold.”

  “This isn’t cold, boy, this is merely brisk! It will get colder, you mark my words.” Mrs Taylor poured Sam some tea from the pot which stood on the fire’s trivet. “But I trust the Captain keeps his bed chamber warm? I cannot risk my girls catching the cold.”

  “It’s warm enough, ma’am.” Sam smiled his thanks as Mrs Taylor invited him to sit down. “He’d like Belinda, if that’s possible?”

  “Dear me, no! Belinda is spoken for. Belinda is at General Grey’s.” Mrs Taylor happily boasted of the high company her girls kept, and Sam encouraged the indiscretions, for all such scraps of gossip were eagerly snapped up by his customers at the stables. “I shall ruminate.” Mrs Taylor picked up her black-bound ledger, found the day’s page, then looked up as a peal of laughter sounded from an upstairs room. “Lord Robert Massedene,” she explained. “Such an amusing young man.”

  “And a gentleman,” Sam said warmly. His regard for Lord Robert Massedene stemmed from the days after Jonathon had been snatched from Mrs Crowl’s house and Sam had heard, through the gossip of the servants in Sir William’s house, how his lordship had striven to have the wounded boy returned to his sister. It had been to no avail. Sir William’s need for a floating bridge was more pressing than Jonathon’s happiness. Besides, Sir William had been assured that Jonathon would receive the best medical attention in the city and neither Lord Robert Massedene’s nor Lizzie Loring’s entreaties could persuade Sir William to offend a prominent Loyalist merchant at the expense of a notorious Patriot widow.

  So Jonathon had been abandoned to his uncle’s care, and Sam could no longer visit him. “I tried to see him,” Sam told Mrs Taylor, who provided a sympathetic ear to his misery, “but they told me to go away.”

  “He’s a hard man, Abel Becket,” Mrs Taylor said. “The milk of human kindness has curdled in him. It’s the war, you know. It changes people, Sam, but it is undoubtedly good for business.”

  “Mr Becket wouldn’t even let Caroline see Jonathon!” Sam sounded outraged.

  “Well, he wouldn’t, dear, would he?” Mrs Taylor said reasonably. “I mean, she’s an intriguing creature, but hardly a fit bride for a Becket! He’s an educated young man.”

  “She can read.” Sam was defensive.

  “I can read, dear, but I doubt that makes me suitable either!” Mrs Taylor sighed. “Not that there’ll be any marriage, Sam, with anyone! I hear the young man’s dying.”

  “Dying?” Sam had heard of Jonathon’
s decline, told it by Jenny who had heard it from one of Hannah Becket’s kitchen maids, but this was the first time Sam had heard how serious Jonathon’s new illness was.

  “It isn’t the leg, dear,” Mrs Taylor said, “but the quinsy.”

  Sam stared at the kindly woman. “You’re sure?”

  Mrs Taylor gave a coquettish shrug. “I shouldn’t say, really, but I know you’re a discreet young man. His priest visits us, dear. Not for that, of course! But to offer spiritual comfort to the girls. He likes to talk.”

  “The quinsy?”

  “So he says.”

  “I can cure that!” Sam said robustly.

  “If you’re allowed to try,” Mrs Taylor said dubiously before looking down at the pages of her book again. “I’ve got a new girl with, well, darkish hair? Sacharissa?”

  “That ain’t her name!” Sam was amused by the wondrous names Mrs Taylor invented for her employees.

  “It is the name of a poetic heroine. I am astonished to find you so ignorant, Sam Gilpin. Sacharissa’s foible is that she is unwilling to leave the house, but the exercise will be good for her, and I can assure her that she’ll be safe with you?”

  “She’ll be safe,” Sam said.

  “And she can’t lie idle here, can she? Very well, Samuel. What has Captain Vane sent tonight?”

  “This, ma’am.” From the watchcoat’s deep pocket Sam drew out a tube of morocco leather from which Mrs Taylor extracted an ivory-barrelled spyglass edged with brass filigree work.

  “Very nice,” she said.

  “He thinks it’s worth three nights, ma’am.”

  “I think it is, yes.” Mrs Taylor wrote the details in her ledger. “Is it another of Mr Franklin’s possessions?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I shall keep it for him.” Mrs Taylor was collecting the more valuable possessions of the Patriots which she declared she would one day return to them. She stood. “I shall fetch Sacharissa for you.”

  Sam also stood, and sought, against hope, one last reassurance. “How bad is Jonathon, ma’am?”

  “Very.” Mrs Taylor shrugged. “The doctors bleed him four times a day. They say it’s the only cure for quinsy, but …” She shrugged and left the sentence unfinished. “Help yourself to the tea while I prepare Sacharissa for her outing.”

  Sam waited. A bell-mouthed blunderbuss with which Mrs Taylor protected her girls from unwanted callers lay on the mantel beneath a neatly worked sampler that Sam laboriously deciphered. It read “Peace be to this house”, while beneath the text, and beneath a carefully worked alphabet, the sampler was signed in neat scarlet stitches: “Margaret Taylor, Aged Seven, 1733”.

  “You’ll be quite safe, girl, don’t be fretful,” Mrs Taylor’s voice sounded in the doorway. Sam turned, and found himself staring into the brown eyes, not of Sacharissa, but of Maggie.

  “Good God!” Sam said.

  “Sacharissa, dear,” Mrs Taylor said.

  “Sam?” Maggie said.

  Sam stared in pure astonishment at her. “Maggie?”

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs Taylor said. “Such an ugly name, and I should know.”

  “I thought you’d gone!” Sam said. “They said you’d run away!”

  There was an instant fear in Maggie’s eyes. “Is Scammy with you?”

  “No. I ain’t seen him in weeks! I’m not with him any more, you see.”

  “I told you” – Mrs Taylor ushered Maggie into the room – “that you’re going to entertain Captain Vane. A most genteel young gentleman.”

  “Where’s Nate?” Maggie seemed oblivious of her employer. She was dressed in a fine woollen cloak and wore her hair piled high on her head. She was clean, pretty, and oddly changed. Her teeth had been cleaned, her face painted, and Sam thought she would not be out of place at any of the fashionable receptions which he was sometimes forced to attend as an orderly.

  “Nate?” Maggie insisted, then, as if sensing the news from Sam’s face, she crumpled on to the sofa and began to cry.

  “The brickdust!” Mrs Taylor yelped in alarm and plucked a handkerchief from her sleeve. She dabbed at the girl’s eyes. The shortages in the city had driven most women to the use of powdered brick instead of rouge, but before Mrs Taylor could prevent them tears had streaked the carefully applied dust.

  “What happened?” Maggie wailed.

  “Didn’t you know?” Sam asked.

  “I thought he’d been caught trying to desert,” Maggie said, “that he wasn’t coming …” her voice died away.

  Sam knew no gentle way to break the news. He felt helpless, he wanted to stay silent, but Maggie’s ruined face stared beseechingly at him and so, with a shrug, he told her. “Scammy shot him in the back.” Sam felt tears at his own eyes. “He’s dead, love.”

  Mrs Taylor patted Maggie’s shoulder. “Get it all out, dear, before you go to work.”

  “I can’t go!” Maggie sobbed.

  “You can’t starve! Of course you go to work!”

  “But he might see me!”

  Mrs Taylor sighed. “Do you know this sergeant, Sam?”

  “I know him, ma’am. But she’ll be all right.” From the watchcoat’s second pocket Sam drew out a small pistol. “See, Maggie?”

  “Sacharissa!” Mrs Taylor insisted.

  “But Scammy knows I’m here!” Maggie cried.

  “He doesn’t, dear.” Mrs Taylor shrugged at Sam, then persuaded and bullied the girl into gloves, hat and shawl. “Do your face when you get there, dear. You’ll be safe!”

  Sam, the torch relit from one of the brothel’s candles, took the girl’s shivering arm and helped her into the alley. She made Sam tell her more about Nate’s death.

  “What happened to you?” Sam asked when he had finished the grisly story. “I heard you’d run off.”

  “I didn’t get far,” Maggie’s voice was utterly miserable. “I’m no good for anything but this, Sam.”

  “That ain’t true.” They walked in silence past the Friends’ Meeting House where shapelessly dressed figures filed into the night.

  “I waited for Nate,” Maggie said forlornly. “Two days, I did. Then I walked up by the river. A dog chased me.”

  “Poor Maggie.”

  “I got to Frankfort, but it wasn’t any good. I had to leave, Sam. You can’t make money as a maid.” She sniffed. “Mrs Taylor’s nice.”

  “I like her,” Sam said warmly.

  “But Scammy knows I’m here!” Maggie’s terror was palpable.

  “He wouldn’t recognize you!” Sam said. “You look wonderful, Maggie! You look like a real lady!”

  Sam’s reassurance was wasted. “The Colonel came, he recognized me!”

  “Elliott won’t tell Scammy.” Sam was not at all certain that he told the truth. “Anyway, Scamrny’s forgotten you by now!”

  “He doesn’t forget. And he likes the money, Sam! It was a guinea a night sometimes! But I get three now!” Maggie said with an obvious pride.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I’m saving up, see?” There was pathetic vivacity in her voice now. “Can’t run on your own, Sam, you have to have money. I might get a ship!”

  “Back to Connecticut?”

  “London!” It seemed Maggie had a new dream now; no longer the promised fifty acres with its three hogs, but the brighter dream of a bigger city. “Or perhaps I’ll meet an officer, Sam, someone who likes me? But not if Scammy finds me.”

  “He won’t,” Sam said. They were walking in the centre of Fourth Street, where the night’s cold had frozen the muddy ruts into hard, awkward ridges, but it was safer to stay in the street centre than to risk the pavements which were so close to the dark alley entrances and to the deep, shadowed doorways of the stores. The flames of Sam’s torch lit the spreading rime of frost on the hard mud.

  Maggie shivered. “What’s this captain like?”

  “He’s all right.” Sam thought about Vane as he helped Maggie over the frosted mud. “He can be funny at time
s, but I ignore that. You just do as he says and don’t argue.”

  Maggie looked at him, her eyes made bright by the tears which glistened in the torchlight. “Is he …?”

  She hesitated, but Sam knew what she was asking. “He ain’t rough, dear, I promise.”

  She smiled up at Sam. “You got a girl?”

  Sam paused for a second, thinking of Caroline’s bright hair, then shook his head. “No.”

  Maggie held his arm close. “If you want, you know? I mean you was nice enough, really.”

  Sam laughed. “I was horrid to you, Maggie.”

  “You don’t know what horrid is, Sam.” She stopped suddenly, scared by an infantry patrol that walked along Arch Street in search of men breaking the curfew.

  Sam felt Maggie shiver. “It’s all right,” Sam said. “Just walk with me.”

  The patrol paced across their front. The men, like Sam, were in hooded watchcoats that made them look like ghostly monks. The last man in the patrol stopped to look at Maggie as Sam hurried her past. The man went on watching until Sam plucked her into the shadows of Cherry Alley.

  “He recognized me!” Maggie said.

  “He just fancied you!” Sam pushed open the back door of Vane’s lodgings and helped Maggie off with her cloak. “It’s upstairs, love.”

  “It always is.” She dabbed hopelessly at her face.

  When the couple had been served with wine and pickled oysters, Sam went back to the kitchen where wax, tallow and lamp black boiled in a pot to make boot blacking. Sam watched the viscous bubbles burst and wished that Maggie had not returned. He suddenly perceived the war as a maelstrom that sucked innocent people into their own destruction; it had killed Nate, reduced Maggie to a pathetic Sacharissa, and now threatened Jonathon with the hard, racking death of quinsy.