He undressed, but kept on his shirt and linen. Over those small clothes he drew his topcoat. He did not unstrap the leg, but just sat on the bunk and waited.
He would not go to London. Three years before, perhaps two years before, such a lure would have tempted him. Even the rebellion, with all its fine promise, paled against the great temptations of London, but now Jonathon had met Caroline and a city ten times greater than London could not dim her allure.
Jonathon was in love. Yet he also sensed that the love was not entirely mirrored. He had imposed a duty on Caroline, and she had assumed it, but Jonathon was determined he would earn her heartfelt love. Till now, he knew, he had achieved nothing. He had ridden with the rebel army for a few days and fallen at the first smell of action. This night he would prove himself worthy of Caroline. He would escape.
He waited through the ringing of the watches. He waited till there was a period of silence outside the cabin. Then, taking his stick, he opened the door.
A seaman was standing by the ship’s wheel. A lantern hung under the break of the poop cast the shadows of the spokes forward. “Going somewhere, lad?”
Jonathon winced. “My stomach.”
The seaman laughed. “Captain’s broth, eh? You’d best develop a seaman’s stomach, lad. You want a chamberpot?”
“I’ll use the heads.”
“You want help?”
“No, but thank you.” Jonathon limped for’ard. His wooden leg thumped on the deck past the cannons and past the two men who kept a watch for rebel gunboats. The galley fire still burned low as Jonathon limped past. At the ship’s bows, where the great bowsprit reared up into the starlit darkness in a web of ropes, chains and netting, there was a low rail, beyond which and suspended over the flowing tide were the heads.
Jonathon flinched with pain as he lifted his wooden leg over the rail. He gripped a rope and edged his one good leg out on to the spar, then, just as he was about to topple over, he sat. He saw that the seaman who had been standing by the wheel had followed him down the deck and was now watching him. Jonathon supposed that, despite Captain Carroll’s assurance that he was not a prisoner, he was nevertheless regarded as a rebel in need of watchful supervision.
Jonathon draped his topcoat about him, sat, and looked down to the black water. Beneath him was a spreading net to save men who might fall from the precarious perch, while to his right was the full-breasted figurehead of the Deirdre-Ann. Her great painted eyes glittered eerily in the starlight. Beyond her, dark through the tangle of rigging and crossed by the vast black anchor cable, Jonathon could see the shore. It did not seem very far away.
The seaman, perhaps out of delicacy, turned to walk towards the galley.
As soon as the man was gone, Jonathon unbuckled the wooden leg. One strap was round his thigh, the second about his waist. The cold made his fingers clumsy. The leather cup stuck to his stump, but he pulled it away and felt the blessed coolness of the night air on the chafed and bleeding flesh. He dropped the leg, with the stick, into the net. One glance to his left showed that the seaman was out of sight and, knowing that delay could be fatal, Jonathon shrugged off his topcoat, then reached out and grasped one of the bowsprit’s shrouds with both his hands. He let himself fall, hung for an instant from the thickly tarred rope, then dropped.
He bounced in the fouled netting. One tarred strand of the net cut across his stump, almost making him cry aloud, but he bit the noise back as he found his wooden leg and stick. He struggled up the netting’s side. It was harder than he could have dreamed possible. His one foot kept slipping through the netting’s holes, but he reached for its top edge with his right hand, and, with the new strength in his arms, pulled himself up until he stared down at the black tide just six feet beneath him. The stick and wooden leg were in his left hand. He lay along the netting for an instant, then rolled over, but kept a grip on the bobstay with his right hand. He hung for a heartbeat, then dropped.
The water was like ice.
It was so cold it almost seemed to burn him.
He plunged under and bobbed up against the rough, harsh hull of the ship. He was sobbing with the cold, shivering and trembling, but he pushed himself down the hull and trusted that the stick and stump would give him buoyancy. He had never swum in his life, though he remembered how Caroline had once told him it was as easy as walking. He prayed she was right.
The tide carried Jonathon down the ship’s side. He clutched the leg and stick beneath his breast and fended himself off the great hull. He dimly heard a shout above him, and knew he had been missed.
He braced his good leg against the hull and thrust himself away from the towering ship. Water slopped into his mouth, choked him, and he spat and spluttered as he flailed with his one free arm. He saw the reflections of light on the water and knew a lantern was being held over the ship’s side.
“Hey!” The voice seemed very close. “Hey, lad!” A rope suddenly splashed close beside him and Jonathon, who was still only feet from the merchantman, kicked with his one leg and desperately dragged back with his right hand, feeling as he did so the surge of the tide lift and carry him away from the Deirdre-Ann.
He was swimming grimly now. He was clumsy, splashing and desperate, but the wood bore him up and his desperation gave him enough momentum to pass outside the lantern’s small light. He could hear bare feet running on the deck, then a shout as someone ordered the gig to be lowered.
The cold was eating into his flesh. He wore only a shirt. He fought for every breath. He heard noises behind and when he twisted round to look, he was astonished at how far from the Deirdre-Ann he was. The tide was carrying him, sweeping him towards the eddies of the New Jersey shore, taking him into the dark swirls where he would de hidden by the shadows of shoals and mudbanks.
Blocks squealed as the gig was lowered. Jonathon still floundered onwards, swallowing water, choking, but somehow keeping afloat and grimly determined to escape the fate his uncle had ordained. The thick bulk of the wooden leg was his salvation, and bravery his inspiration.
He heard, faint behind him, the order to pull on the oars and a last flicker of good sense made him stop his frantic beating of the water. He hugged the leg. The stick was gone. He floated, turning in the eddies, sobbing because of the cold. He thought of Caroline, summoning her image like a spirit of the ocean that would save him and keep him. He wanted to say her name aloud, as a talisman, but he kept silent except for the chattering of his teeth and the involuntary frozen sobs. He could not hear the gig, and dared not look.
The surging tide, that could have swept him to a grave in the wide river mouth, saved him. It was at the flood and it carried him landwards to bump him, as gently as another current had once put Moses among the bulrushes, against a glistening bank of mud. For a few moments, in the agony of his cold, Jonathon did not even know he was safe, then, with the blind instinct of a man on the very edge of death, he crawled towards the darker loom of the New Jersey shore.
He crawled in thick sticky mud that coated him black. He crawled through a creek and up on to another mud bank where, exhausted, he collapsed. He looked up to see the line of the shore stark against the stars, then he heard the creak and splash of oars behind him. He turned cautiously to see the gig’s shadow on the water, and, like a wounded beast, he slithered down to the edge of the last creek. He would lie there, hidden by the swell of the mudbank, till his pursuers were gone.
He did not know that he slept, nor that the cold had driven him into the refuge of dreams. He thought he was marching, with two sound legs, in a sweet-smelling meadow beneath a summer’s sun. Around him, victorious, were men who sang beneath a striped flag. The enemy was dead, beaten, their colours surrendered and their guns quite cold. Afterwards, he dreamed of a girl with golden hair who would welcome the hero home from the wars, and he smiled as he thought of her arms reaching for him and of her smile rewarding him. Then the cold touch of the rising tide slithered him from dream into brute reality and his eyes opened to see, not
Caroline, but the first flush of dawn touching the rippled ridges of the mud before his eyes.
And he saw two pairs of boots. Two men were standing just inches from his face.
Jonathon tried to raise his head to speak to the men, but one of the boots nudged his face sideways towards the water at the creek’s edge. “Caroline!” Jonathon said, then the water was cold in his mouth and nostrils.
There was only two inches of water, but it was enough. One of the men put a seaboot on to the back of Jonathon’s skull and held his face under the saltwater. It was as easy as drowning a kitten. Jonathon shivered and twitched for a few moments. His left hand clawed feebly at the mud, then went still. A little blood, seeping from the stump of his leg, had oozed into the creek.
Captain Carroll lifted his boot and saw that the boy was dead. “An ungrateful lad.” Captain Carroll shook his head sadly, almost as if he had been personally offended by Jonathon’s predilection for the rebels. “Offered the world on a platter, and he throws it away.” He spoke to the gig’s bo’sun. The gig itself was a hundred yards away at the end of the mudbank.
“It’s a miracle he lasted this long.” The bo’sun stooped and turned the body in a vain search for any valuables. “He said your name.”
“The Lord alone knows why. I’ve no love for rebels.” Carroll rolled Jonathon’s body into the shallow creek, then turned to walk back to the waiting gig. “It was better this way,” he said calmly.
“I’d have tipped him over the side,” the bo’sun grumbled as though he had been cheated of some anticipated pleasure.
“Money’s the same.” Carroll’s face flickered with the uncontrollable tic. “And this way he’ll be found and Woollard will know our agreement was kept.”
The tide was almost at the full. The leading merchantmen were already hoisting their anchors to negotiate the cleared passage, but they had to wait as a naval sloop, sailing towards Philadelphia, warped past the obstructions first. The bo’sun, who had once served in the Royal Navy, shaded his eyes to see the warship better. “Porcupine,” he said. “A fast sailor.”
“A pretty ship,” Carroll said grudgingly. The Porcupine, clear of the obstructions, loosed her mainsails and the water seethed white at her stern. Her sails were streaked and dirty, evidence of a long, hard passage. “Despatches from London?” Carroll wondered aloud.
“Most likely, sir,” the bo’sun agreed, then shouted for the gig’s oarsmen to back their blades and bring the boat’s transom close to the mud.
Two hours later the river was empty. Jonathon’s body drifted on the tide to the eddies about the sunken obstacles which the rebels had planted the previous summer. There his body snagged and stayed. Gulls found him and tore at water-whitened flesh.
While above him, and filling the sky with the glory of their wings, the geese skeined north.
Thirty-Eight
Major-General Sir Henry Clinton arrived at the city by a frigate from which, as the vessel edged past the old rebel obstructions in the river, a sharp-eyed topman saw a body lying caught in the twisted black, stakes. The frigate’s captain, unwilling to delay so important a passenger, refused to stop. Instead a signal was made to a nearby sloop which lowered a boat as the frigate went on to the city.
Sir Henry was not welcomed in Philadelphia as Sir William’s men had been greeted seven months before. Winter, Saratoga and the news brought by the Porcupine had done their work on the city’s Loyalists. The Porcupine had done the worst damage to morale for, in its despatches from London, came news that France had declared war and that consequently a small rebellion had been blown into a European conflict; indeed, more than European, for fortresses as far removed as Florida and India were being warned and readied for battle.
And so Sir Henry rode through gloomy streets. They were also filthy streets, for the city’s thoroughfares had become tips of stinking ordure. Standards, Sir Henry thought grimly, had been left to slide. Fewer parties and dances and more discipline would do Philadelphia a world of good. Sir Henry, thinking of the augean task ahead of him, had the face of a man come to kill shambolic uncertainty with force and decision.
Yet, before he could impose his will upon his new command, the due ceremonies must be completed and so Sir Henry rode to the Centre Commons that were filled with the panoply of eight thousand paraded soldiers. There were dark-uniformed Hessians, red-coated British, and cavalrymen in their rainbow finery hung with lace and gilded chains; and all paraded behind their colours to be inspected by their old and their new Commanders-in-Chief.
“Fine! Very fine!” Sir Henry, trotting down the ranks of the 40th, complimented their Colonel. If the city was filthy, then at least the men looked spruce and fit. Sir William, he allowed, had not let all standards slip.
It was clear, too, just how popular Sir William was. Sir Henry must listen to the cheers with which each battalion said farewell to Sir William Howe, and the sound confirmed to Sir Henry just how difficult a task he was undertaking. The men would resent his coming because they lamented his predecessor’s leaving, yet Sir Henry was sure that there was no soldier’s unhappiness that could not be cured by a day’s fighting and the reward of victory.
The two Generals rode together to the western edge of the Commons. A massed band played “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and, as ever, the musicians extended the last note into a discordant raspberry to mock the pretensions of the Yankee enemy. As the music changed to the “Grenadiers’ March”, so the great parade began its own march past. Ladies, come from the city to watch the fine display, added the colours of their fringed parasols to the day’s finery.
“I hear,” Sir William leaned confidingly towards his successor, then winced because his back gave a sudden and sharp stab of pain, “that our enemies have done little else but drill training all winter.”
“Then perhaps they’ll give us better sport!” Sir Henry saluted the colours of a Highland battalion, all tough clansmen who followed their hereditary chieftains to war. With such men, Sir Henry thought, how could the war be lost? After the Scots came the 2nd battalion of the New Jersey Volunteers, then the green-uniformed horsemen of the Queen’s Rangers.
Sir William nodded towards the Loyalist cavalry. “The best horsemen you have!”
“But not mine yet. It might be more convenient,” Sir Henry saluted the colours of an Irish regiment, “if you retained effective command until you leave?”
“That’s most kind of you, most kind.” Sir William sounded astonished at the generous offer. “I won’t hesitate to accept, but are you certain?”
“I’m certain,” Sir Henry said curtly, not caring to say that he was nervous of stepping into Sir William’s place. The troops’ resentment at losing their popular commander might be lessened if Sir William retained effective command until the day he left. That way no immediate and odious comparisons could be made, and Sir Henry would be granted a breathing space in which he could judge the men he was to inherit. “Though doubtless your departure will be soon?” Sir Henry did not bother to hide his eagerness.
“There’s just the Meschianza to endure,” Sir William said apologetically.
“Meschianza?”
Sir William smiled. “It’s concocted of two Italian words. Mescere, to mix, and mischiare, to mingle. A very fanciful word to describe a small party which will mark my farewell.” He waved at Lord Cathcart who led the Hussars in review. “Nothing too lavish, you understand?” Sir William added modestly.
“Indeed.” The word Meschianza summed up all Sir Henry’s derision of Philadelphia’s famous social life of the past winter. Sir Henry had encouraged no such frippery in New York.
“And I’m still a Peace Commissioner, of course, so I shall stay in America for as long as is necessary.” Sir William’s old enthusiasm shone through. “You heard the rebels have agreed to meet us?”
“But not in Philadelphia?” Sir Henry sounded justifiably alarmed at the thought of his predecessor lingering in the city.
“I thought I’d request th
e meeting in New York,” Sir William said happily. “Perhaps there’ll be no more fighting?”
Sir Henry believed peace was as likely a prospect as pigs growing wings, but he said nothing on the matter during the parade, nor during the dinner which followed, as lavish as the one at which Sir William had announced his imminent departure. And again, as on that previous occasion, every available officer’s servant was ordered to attend. Sam Gilpin, as he served slices of roast goose, heard a distant crackle of musketry. Heads turned towards the windows. Again the musketry sounded. Sir William smiled at Lord Robert Massedene. “Would you investigate, Robert? I’m loath to think the rebels are greeting Sir Henry so rudely, but I fear that must be the answer.”
Lord Massedene returned a half-hour later to report that an enemy cavalry patrol had made a brief appearance on the Germantown Road to the north of the city redoubts. “It seemed to be a feu de joie, sir.”
Massedene had spoken to Sir William, but Sir Henry took it upon himself to give a testy response. “In English, man! This isn’t a whorehouse!”
Robert Massedene reddened. “The rebels are firing muskets in celebration, sir. They also saw fit to unfurl a French flag.”
“God damn their insolence,” Sir Henry growled.
After luncheon the two Commanders-in-Chief retired to Sir William’s study. “I fear,” Sir William said, putting Hamlet on his lap, “that the news from France will make your task hard. Very hard.”
“It might.” Sir Henry paced the floor between fireplace and table.
“Might?”
Sir Henry scowled. “London has ordered me to send eight thousand men to the islands.”
“Are they sending you any replacements from England?”
“Two thousand if they can. They’re scouring Hanover as well, of course.”
“Good God.” Sir William stared into the fire which, even though spring was warming the land, he still liked to find burning in his study. “Good God. One third of your troops going to the Caribbean?” His voice expressed all the relief of a man who no longer needed to pick at the Gordian knot.