Jonathon flinched with not pain but sudden anger. “I just can’t bear to think of them coming here! Strutting up our streets! Flaunting themselves in our houses! Mocking our people!”
“If they come at all.” Martha did not sound hopeful, but it was a time for Patriots to clutch at straws. “I heard they might go south, to Baltimore?”
Jonathon seemed not to hear. He was still staring at the rooftops that were sharp-edged against what promised to be another cloudless sky. “I can’t bear to stay and see them gloat.”
“It will be hard,” Martha agreed.
Jonathon turned towards her. “So I’m leaving.”
Martha went very still. Her brother was a dark silhouette in the window, but she did not need to see his face to know what a stubborn expression it would show. “Leaving?”
“I’ve been useful so far,” Jonathon’s words were suddenly febrile. “I’m a good trader! I’ve served the Congress well! I’ve supplied the army with hides, pig-iron, flints, and powder, but the British are coming! If we trade now it will have to be with the enemy. So my usefulness is at an end. If I stay here I have to take British gold and sell to British traders, and I can’t do it! I won’t do it!”
“You’re too proud to do it?”
“If you like, yes.”
Martha still watched her brother’s silhouette. “So what will you do?”
“I can ride!” Jonathon slapped his right leg. “I agree I can’t march, but I ride as well as any man, and all a cavalryman needs to do is ride and fight.” He smiled at his sister. “I’m going to volunteer.”
“Oh, you can ride!” Martha said scathingly. “But suppose the horse gets shot? What will you do? Hop away from the enemy?”
Jonathon laughed. “If I have to, yes.”
“You’re a fool!” She stood and walked away from him. “Good God, Jonathon! You’re a fool!” She turned on him. “Or is this Caroline’s doing?” Jonathon offered no answer and Martha, irritated by his calm, snapped at her brother. “You can’t marry her!”
Jonathon smiled. “As it happens, I haven’t asked her to marry me.”
Martha, more emotional than her brother, felt her irritation growing. “Can she read?”
“Fluently.”
“You know Ezra Woollard wanted to marry her?”
“And she said no.” Jonathon was keeping his answers mild. It was a habit that annoyed some people, for under even the most extreme provocation he held his temper and always sounded reasonable.
Martha, on the other hand, could sound most unreasonable. “She’s a tradesgirl! She lives across the river! She sells me vegetables!”
“And I’m a tradesman.” Jonathon laughed. “But the answer to your original question, dear sister, is that Caroline has tried to dissuade me from leaving the city. She thinks like you.”
“That’s something in her favour,” Martha said acidly. “My God, haven’t you done enough? The army needs whole men, not cripples!”
Jonathon still did not rise to her provocation. “They need men.”
“I won’t let you do it.” Martha walked back to the window seat. “If you go away to fight, you’ll lose your inheritance, and all our father’s work will be for nothing! Ezra Woollard will take the business. Abel likes him! And Uncle Abel hasn’t a son to leave anything to! Is that what you want?”
“I think I want what you want, liberty.”
“God help us!” Martha stared into her brother’s dark and amused eyes. “I’m sorry I called you a cripple.”
“But it’s true. I lurch about the city for the amusement of small children. It’s something I’ve got used to doing. But now I want to be a soldier.”
Martha sat beside him. “Suppose I offer you another and even better way of righting against the British?”
“Tell me.”
Martha hesitated a second, as though seeking the right words that would keep her brother from his foolishness. “I’m staying in the city because it’s my home, and it’s Lydia’s home, and I can’t bear to think of us being harried about the countryside by a pack of Redcoats. So I’ll endure them, but I’ll fight them! I’ll entertain them, Jonathon, I’ll give them wine and music, and I’ll listen to their jests, and all the time I’ll be listening. You can do that! If you trade with the British, you’ll become intimate with them. They’ll trust you. They’ll tell you things. And you’ll see things on the wharves! What troops arrive and how many? Those are the things we have to tell our army, and it’s a far more useful task than pulling a trigger!”
“Maybe.”
“Not maybe! Of course it is!” Martha sought for another reason to make Jonathon stay and, in her desperation, used an argument that would fly in the face of all she wanted for her brother. “And Caroline will stay. You’ll be close to her!”
Jonathon was silent for a few seconds. He watched the skeins of smoke drift from the kitchen chimneys, then sighed. “If I stay here in comfort I shall despise myself.”
“No one will blame you!”
“Because of this?” Jonathon tapped his right leg.
“Because of that, yes!”
He smiled. “But I know, sister, and you know, that I can do almost anything another man can do. And if another man can fight, and risk his inheritance, then I can fight and risk mine. No one would blame me if I didn’t, but I’d blame myself!”
“You’re a fool.” Martha stared through the window. “The British aren’t here yet, and the Loyalists aren’t crowing their victory, so will you wait? That’s all I ask! Just wait!”
“So you can dissuade me?”
“So that I can persuade you that by staying you can do more damage to the enemy than by going, that’s why!”
“I’ll wait,” Jonathon said. “I wasn’t planning to leave immediately, so you’ve time to harass me.”
“It’s not harassment.” Martha closed her eyes. “I’ve lost my mother, father, and husband. Am I now to lose you?”
“God’s already played his joke on me,” Jonathon said deprecatingly, “and I doubt he plans worse.”
“You think you’ll live for ever?” Martha asked bitterly.
“I think,” Jonathon said calmly, “that I’d like another cup of tea.”
Thus Philadelphia, fairest of cities on the American coast, waited for the beat of foreign drums. The Redcoats were coming.
Three
“’Talion!” The sergeant-major’s voice could be heard three fields away, “’Shun!”
Seven hundred right boots thumped on to the dry pastureland, followed by an utter stillness in the ranks. Ten companies were on parade, formed into three sides of a square, and in each company the tallest men were on the flanks, the shortest in the centre, so that the long battalion line rose and fell and rose and fell like a well-clipped ornamental hedge. Sergeants, canes ready, prowled behind the battalion. The sun sparked from belt buckles and musket fittings.
The sky was cloudless and the day had an oppressive, humid heat that itched beneath the men’s thick red woollen coats. Sweat glistened on their faces.
Facing the paraded battalion, where the fourth side of the square should have been, was a tall tripod made of split rails. The apex of the tripod was eight feet above the ground, looking for all the world as if it waited for one of the cumbersome Flaunders cauldrons to be suspended from it. But no cooking fire was lit beneath this tripod; instead, a soldier, stripped to his dirty breeches, was lashed by wrists and ankles to the newly split wood. A plank, torn down from a chapel in the nearby village, had been nailed across two of the staves so that the victim could not bend his naked back away from the lash. No leather pad covered the man’s kidneys, a sure sign that his officers wanted him to die in this hot American evening.
Two men watched from a hundred yards away. They were not in the battalion on punishment parade, and thus were free to express opinions that could have doomed them to the same fate as the prisoner. “What he did wrong,” Private Nathaniel Gilpin said, “was getting caught.�
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“What he did wrong,” Sam Gilpin corrected his twin brother, “was to run. Daft as lights.” Most of Sam’s uniform was piled on the grass and now he pulled the black spatterdashes from his ankles and took off his boots. Like the man pinioned to the tripod, Sam was stripped to the waist, but Sam faced no punishment. Instead, he rolled up his breeches, waded into the small stream and, whistling as he worked, began to scrub down Captain Kelly’s mare, Cleo. The horse stood quietly. Sam Gilpin had always been good with animals. Good with every living thing, and too good, his mother said, for the army, but seventeen-year-olds are blessed with certainty and Sam had broken his mother’s heart.
His brother Nate seemed obsessed by the flogging. The drums sounded across the field as the two boys with the whips whirled the lashes twice about their heads before bringing the thongs slashing down on to the victim’s back. Nate flinched with each stroke. “Must bloody hurt.”
“Of course it bloody hurts! It’s meant to, isn’t it?” Sam ignored the flogging. He was happy working with horses; a reminder of the world he had left behind when he took the red coat three years before. He was twenty years old now, tall, with a cheerful, quick face. His hair, now whitened by flour paste, was naturally golden and drawn back to a stiff queue. “Don’t watch it!” He was brushing the dust from the horse’s flanks, seeing how the shine of the coat was growing back. Many of the officers’ horses had died during the terrible, heat-savaged voyage from New York. The fleet, for reasons that no soldier would ever know, had lingered for days in the long, sun-reflecting swell as the food turned rancid and the flux fouled the ship’s bowels and the horses, driven mad by heat and thirst, kicked their stalls to bloody shreds so that they had to be shot. These few weeks on shore had worked wonders for the survivors.
Sam touched the long scar on the mare’s haunch and noticed she did not quiver. The wound was healing well. A rebel bullet had gouged her pelt at Brandywine Creek, but Sam had made a poultice of old bread and cobwebs which had worked its usual miracle. He stroked the mare’s nose. “Tough old thing, aren’t you, Cleo? Ain’t a Yankee who can kill you, eh?”
“Oh, Jesus.” Nate was watching the blood stream down the victim’s white breeches. The man jerked and twisted in his bonds as the alternating lashes landed, while, after each stroke, the boys drew the whips through smeared fingers to free the leather thongs of blood and gobbets of flesh. “Poor bastard.”
“Don’t watch!” But just as Sam said it, the victim spat the leather wedge from his mouth and gave a wavering, horrid scream that pricked the mare’s ears back and made Sam turn despite his distaste. Men from other battalions, men bivouacking in the spread of fields either side of the dirt road, flinched because of the foul, despairing scream. Sam shuddered. “They should just shoot him.”
“He shouldn’t have got caught, should he?” Nate said.
“He shouldn’t have run. Asking for trouble, running.” The man was a deserter, recaptured. To desert the army was the unforgiveable sin, and the sin most savagely punished.
“I’ll do it properly,” Nate grinned. He was darker than Sam, but they shared the same mischievous face. Tall, country-bred boys who had been the Recruiting Sergeant’s dream; only now Nate had a dream of his own. He wanted to desert. He wanted to run because he was certain that, somewhere beyond this humid coastal plain, there was an American paradise where crops grew without effort, where the apple trees were so heavy with fruit that boughs broke under the succulent weight, and where, most important of all, Nate could be alone with Maggie. There was no hunger in Nate’s American paradise, no touching the forelock to the Squire, and no red coats. No sergeants, no floggings, no spatterdashes, no leather stocks, no slashing canes and mornings thick with vomit and children crying in the night. No army.
“They’ll catch you,” Sam did not believe in Nate’s paradise, “and they’ll flog you till your ribs are bare. Don’t be a bloody idiot, Nate.” He looked at his brother with a mixture of fondness and pleading. They had always been close, were close still, but Sam could not bear the thought of his brother running into chaos and pain. “Don’t even think about it!”
“Three could do it better than two, Sam.”
“They’ll catch you and flog you and I’ll bury you. Don’t be a goddamned bloody fool!” Sam’s affection for Nate made his voice angry. He turned away and untangled the mare’s mane. He remembered the pleasure he used to take from grooming the great plough-horses on high days back home.
Three heifers, thin and mournful, were driven to the stream’s edge thirty yards away. Behind the animals and their butchers came a straggle of the battalion’s wives and children. Muskets were cocked, aimed, and three shots sounded flat and harsh in the hot humid air. The three heifers shuddered and crumpled heavily on to the grass. One of the beasts still bellowed, then was chopped through the spine with an axe blow. The hooves of the others kicked feebly as the four butchers unsheathed their knives. Blood spilt like water and the children laughed to see it. The women, their own knives drawn, crept close like wild animals to snatch for flesh. One of the butchers backhanded with a wet axe to drive them back. A brindle mongrel bitch snarled, and the thick smell of new blood made Cleo whinny and Sam’s nostrils wrinkle.
“Beef tonight.” Nate forgot the flogging for a moment. “Be a change from bloody pork. Maggie’s there.”
“Leave her alone, Nate!”
“She won’t leave me alone.” Nate stared towards the butchers who were now tossing the livers and kidneys into a wooden bucket as delicacies for the officers’ mess. “She’s seen me.”
“For Christ’s sake, Nate!” Sam led the horse a few yards upstream, as if to take his brother away from the girl’s gaze, but a fallen willow trunk barred any escape in that direction. The smell of newly lit cooking fires came from the battalion lines while, in the next field, the flogging went on, mercifully silent again. The man had been sentenced to one thousand lashes of the six-thonged cat. A group of officers, their uniforms bright in the evening sunlight, checked their horses to watch the deserter’s agony.
Sam concentrated on his work. It was not his job to look after Captain Kelly’s mare, but all the battalion’s officers knew that Sam Gilpin did a better job than their own servants and so were happy to pay him a shilling or so to groom and doctor their beasts. He wiped Cleo’s eyes and nostrils with a wet rag, then heard the telltale splashing in the water just beyond the patient mare.
“Nate!” Maggie smiled in nervous greeting. Her skirts trailed in the water which, reflecting the late afternoon sun, made ripples of light on her thin, sun-browned face. Nate embraced her, careless of who might be watching. The girl looked over Nate’s shoulder and smiled at Sam. “Hello, Sam.”
“Mrs Scammell,” Sam acknowledged her presence very formally.
“I got you this.” Maggie had a bloody scrap of oxtail that she offered, not to Nate, but to Sam. It was Maggie who had put the idea of desertion into Nate’s head, and Maggie who knew that Nate would not run without his brother. Maggie was for ever trying to persuade Sam to join them, but Sam was not unhappy in the army. Sam had discovered he could fight as well as the next man, he liked the horses, and he reckoned he could avoid the punishments.
He refused to take the oxtail. “Give it to your husband, Maggie.”
“I never church married him!” She was suddenly vehement.
“Don’t need to, do you?” Sam knew his words were making his brother miserable, but Sam had always been the stronger of the twins and considered it his job to look after Nate. “Now go away, Maggie! You want to have Nate flogged? Look, girl!” Sam pointed at the triangle. “It ain’t pretty, is it?”
But Maggie would not look at the blood-soaked man. She drew Nate into the shelter of the mare’s flank where they were hidden from the battalion’s bivouac in the meadow. Flies buzzed at Sam’s sweat-soaked chest and face as the lovers twined sad arms and stared at him as if capable strong Sam was the person who could answer their dreams and take them away from
the army.
And Sam could understand Nate’s obsession. Most of the women who followed the battalion were drudges – diseased and ugly, with tangled, matted hair and foul, reeking mouths – but Maggie was somehow different. Her brown hair was greasy and lank, but it framed a wistful, appealing face that made men want to protect her. She looked, Sam thought, ever on the point of tears, but also as if a single kind touch or loving word would light her face with happiness.
Which happiness Sam wished for Maggie, but in New York she had chosen Sergeant Scammell, and the sergeant was a jealous man. “Why don’t you wait for him to die in battle?” Sam had asked them. “Then you can marry Nate legal!”
“I want to go home,” Maggie would say.
Her home was in Connecticut. It was of Connecticut that Maggie spoke when she filled Nate’s head with her dreams of paradise, of a place where the apples grew so thick that there was scarce room for leaves on the trees, where geese waited to offer their meat to the table, and where the water ran pure as crystal. Maggie had run from that paradise once and gone to New York where she had become a shilling whore in the Holy Town where the brothels did their business. Now she had fallen for Nate and wanted to go home. “They’ll give you fifty acres each,” she pleaded. The oxtail hung at her side, dripping blood on to her skirt. “Fifty acres, two sows, and a hog. They promised it!”
“Promises are easy,” Sam said.
“They will, Sam!” Maggie clung to Nate and stared at Sam with big, braised-looking eyes. “They got it down on paper, didn’t they?”
“You can read?” Sam asked brutally.
“They promised!” Nate said fiercely, like a child.
The rebels had indeed promised the land and the hogs to any man who ran from the British army, but Sam doubted if the land would be worth a thimble of spit, and reckoned the hogs would be fevered if they existed at all. His guess was that Nate’s paradise would have more serpents souring its apple trees than ever the first Paradise did. So Sam would not run with them. “But if you do run,” he leaned against the mare’s flank, “then do it proper! Don’t just go in the night. You’ll get caught. You’ll end up like that poor bastard!” He gestured towards the flogged man who now hung from his leather bonds. Blood dripped to the field.
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