Vane waited as the sentry unlocked the iron grating which gave access to that part of the asylum which had been taken over as a prison for captured American officers. The New Jail on Walnut Street was full, but the asylum had cells, bars and locks as secure as any proper prison. It also stank like a prison. Vane’s nose wrinkled with distaste as he followed the sentry through the cellblock reeking of excrement. There was no heating in this part of the asylum; a single lice-ridden blanket was provided for each prisoner and a thin, fetid layer of straw put into each cell. The prisoners, those who had survived the bitter winter, were in rags, and most of them huddled in fever-racking shivers in corners of their cells. Vane, whose arrival was expected, was shown into a large stone-walled room where a table and chair waited. A sour-faced lieutenant, one of the jail’s duty officers, ordered the prisoner James Lynch to be fetched. “You’ll want tea, sir?” he asked Vane.
“I’m not here to entertain him, Lieutenant,” Vane said curtly. “Just leave us.”
While he waited, Vane took papers, an inkwell, and quills from his sabretache and arranged them on the table. Sergeant Scammell, watching the officer, linked his fingers, reversed his hands, and pushed outwards till the knuckles cracked. The sound made Vane look up. Scammell smiled. Vane, sensing that this man saw into his soul, sat and pretended to be busy with his papers.
The door opened and a prisoner dressed in a thin ticken jacket over soiled calico breeches was dirust into the room. The man had a face paled by long imprisonment, and uncut hair that he had pathetically tried to tie into a semblance of respectability. He shivered from the cold. “You again.” The rebel prisoner spoke scornfully.
Vane was still sorting through the papers on the table and did not bother to look up. “Indeed it is. Good morning, Lieutenant.”
Lieutenant Lynch turned and inspected the Sergeant who waited behind him. Scammell’s face made the rebel officer shiver, then turn back to Vane. “I want parole!”
“So you said at our last meeting.” That meeting had been four days before, in the early morning after the subscription ball, and the outcome had driven Captain Vane to seek Sergeant Scammell’s help. He still hoped that help would not be required.
Lynch still insisted. “I have a right to parole! I’m an officer!”
Vane looked up at him. Lynch’s face was pockmarked, scarred, and gaunt. The winter’s hunger and disease had nearly broken him, yet there was still a feverish defiance in the haggard face. Vane shrugged. “You may have parole, Lieutenant, on the payment of one hundred pounds.”
Lynch, who could not even imagine amassing such a fortune, spat his protest towards the elegant Captain Vane. “It’s our right! It don’t take money!”
Vane smiled. “You forfeited your right, Lieutenant, by your dishonourable behaviour. If American officers could keep solemn oaths, then no bond would be required.”
“I don’t need lessons in honour from the English!” Lynch still had a trace of an Irish accent, and all the defiance of that race.
“It’s evident you do.” Vane sounded amused. The oath of parole would release a captive rebel officer to live freely within the city, but the oath also bound such a man, on his solemn honour, not to attempt to rejoin Washington’s army. Too many American officers, despising the oath as an anachronistic foible, and seeing within it their chance to escape, had made the promise, then run. George Washington, in his correspondence with Sir William, had deplored their behaviour, but not returned such men to captivity. The correspondence was entirely consumed with matters concerning the comforts of prisoners, and both sides, with equal cynicism, assured the other that their prisoners received only the finest attention. Vane smiled at Lynch. “You have a hundred pounds, Lieutenant?”
“You know I don’t.”
“Then you must stay as His Majesty’s guest.” Vane opened his inkwell and dipped a quill in the liquid as if to demonstrate that the pleasantries were now over and the proper business of this meeting could begin. “Your name is Lieutenant James Lynch, and you were an officer in the garrison at Fort Mercer. Is that correct?”
“And why aren’t you feeding us? We get slops, you bastard! It ain’t food!”
Sergeant Scammell shifted against the wall, as if eager to teach this rebel a lesson in manners. Vane ignored the Sergeant. “Your Mister Washington is required to provide your rations, not us. Would you kindly answer my question, Lieutenant?”
“You know damn well who I am. How many times do you need to ask me, Englishman?”
“As often as is necessary,” Vane said mildly. He wrote Lynch’s name on a clean sheet of paper. “You recall the Hessian attack on Fort Mercer?”
“I remember killing a score of you bastards.”
“Who brought you warning of that attack?”
“No one.”
So far the questioning had followed the course of Vane’s first interrogation of Lynch: virulent protests at the conditions inside the jail interspersed with blank denials. Vane let excess ink run from the quill’s tip, then laid the feather down beside the paper. “You told Major Zeigler that you were warned. I wish to know who brought that message.”
“There was no message.”
Vane stood, walked to the small barred window, and stared into a courtyard where tiny shoots of new grass showed green beneath a dead, black tree. “There was a bastion at Fort Mercer which your garrison abandoned. On the night before the attack it was re-occupied. You would not do such an arbitrary thing, Lieutenant, unless you had been given warning of an imminent attack.” Vane turned, his boots scraping on the stone. “I know you were warned. You boasted of receiving the message when you were first captured. I have a record of your words.”
“I lied. We weren’t warned. We beat you square, Englishman, and we’ll beat you square out of this whole country!”
Vane sighed and walked back to the table. He wanted the name of the messenger, for the messenger could lead him to the next link in this chain of betrayal. He searched the papers on the table and brought out a sheet that bore a red-wax seal. “This, lieutenant, is a warrant which grants me the authority to deliver you to our guardpost on the Wissahickon Road. There you will be provided with clothes, a horse, and money. You may then go free to wherever you wish within the colonies.” He put the paper on the table where Lynch could read the words. “All you need to do is tell me who warned you of the attack on Fort Mercer.”
Lynch stared at the paper, then looked up at Vane. “Piss on you, mister.”
Vane walked close to the rebel. “What elegant officers Mister Washington is reduced to employing. No wonder your men run like rabbits in battle.” Vane stared at Lynch as though daring the man to attack him. Lynch seemed to be tempted, but controlled himself. Vane sighed. “Sergeant Scammell!”
“Sir?”
“You heard my questions?”
“Distinctly, sir!”
“You might be more efficacious than myself at eliciting the answers?”
Scammell understood the intent, if not the exact meaning of the words. “I might, sir. But I want a word first.”
Vane turned, astonished at the Sergeant’s defiance, yet helpless in the face of it. The orders he gave were illegal, and well Scammell knew it, so Vane could do nothing but nod and gesture to the door. “Outside.”
They were gone five minutes, leaving Lynch to contemplate his fate. They were five minutes in which Captain Vane made a pact with the devil, and Sergeant Scammell discovered the desperation for victory that burned inside the Captain.
At the end of that five minutes, the cell door re-opened and Sergeant Scammell ducked under the lintel. He came in alone, locked the door, then stared into Lynch’s face. “You have one minute, fuckpig, to tell me everything.”
“I am an officer and you call me – ”
Scammell did not bother to wait the minute, but started his work.
Christopher Vane walked away from the sound. He wanted clean air, unsullied by excrement and horror. He kicked the lunatics
aside and went into the street where, leaning on the asylum’s outer wall, he filled his lungs with the damp chill of the April air.
What he did was wrong, and he knew it. It was dishonourable, and that galled him, yet from the dishonour, and from the devil’s pact he had made with a sergeant, could come one of the keys to victory. There was a traitor, and the traitor was close to Sir William, and there could be no victory unless the traitor was stopped. And victory, Vane persuaded himself, justified any act, for victory would discourage France and crush an insolent rebellion. This spring, despite Sir William’s vacillations that sprang from his hopes of peace, the army would have to make one great effort to trap and destroy the rebel army, but that effort would be in vain if it was betrayed. And so Vane vindicated what happened now within the bare, cold room, yet, even as he thus persuaded himself, the sudden fear of discovery griped at his belly.
A jingle of harness made him turn. Coming down the street and drawn by two spirited greys was a high-sprung phaeton with yellow wheels and a scarlet body. On the driver’s box, the reins held with an aplomb more usual in a coachman, sat Sir William Howe. Behind him sat Lizzie Loring.
Christopher Vane, not wanting to be seen, twisted away. He was hiding from his own kind, like a criminal, and he had an urge to plunge back into the madhouse to end the savagery that could destroy him.
Instead, safe again inside the asylum, he listened to the horrid sounds which slowly, slowly faded. It took twenty minutes, but at the end of that time Sergeant Scammell came out of the cell with the answers that Captain Vane had sought. “It was a bugger called Davie Logan, sir.” Scammell’s hands were bloodied. “He’s a ferryman, sir, somewhere up the river. He has one eye and a broken nose.”
Vane stared at the big Sergeant. “He’s not from the city?”
“Up river, sir. A few miles.”
“Jesus.” Vane said it softly. He had expected the name of someone within Philadelphia. He had hoped for the name of Martha Crowl, but now he was given a name that meant nothing, and a name which belonged to a man who lived out of Vane’s reach. He swore softly. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” ScammeH’s voice was grim.
“How’s the prisoner?” Vane’s question was perfunctory.
“Dying, sir.”
Vane’s gaze snapped up. “Dying?”
Scammell, who had the measure of this officer now, gave a scornful grin. “And what the hell else did you want? How were you going to explain one beaten Yankee?”
“I ordered you to frighten him!”
“I did.” The words were implacable.
“Christ!” Vane moved to the cell door, looked inside, and almost retched again. He had to steady himself on the door’s jamb. “Oh my God.”
“I’ll say he attacked you, sir.” Sergeant Scammell was quite unmoved by the bloody and twitching thing on the floor. “We had to kill him, see? He went berserk, he did.”
Vane could not speak. He had intended Lynch to be scared, he had wanted the prisoner to confess the name, but he had never dreamed of savagery such as this. He forced back the retching, then thought that, just as surely as Sergeant Scammell, he could hang for this. He doubled over, gagging.
Scammell stepped past him and drew his bayonet from its scabbard. He stooped, and Captain Vane turned quickly away from the sight. Lynch’s breathing, which had been hoarse and whimpering, suddenly stopped.
Scammell stood up. “There won’t be no trouble, sir.”
“Jesus.” Vane was having to snatch for breath.
“He attacked you, fought like a bloody lunatic, and I had to kill him.” Scammell wiped the blood from the bayonet and left the cell. He was in command now.
Vane nodded weakly. “Yes, Sergeant.”
“He ain’t the first prisoner to go to hell, sir.”
Vane needed the reassurance desperately. “I’m sure.”
“And Maggie, sir?” Scammell, taller than Vane, looked confidingly down on the officer. “I’ll come tonight?”
The Sergeant’s confiding and conspiratorial tone clawed at Vane’s self-esteem. He straightened up, determined to regain mastery of this horrific relationship. “You’ll get your woman back, Sergeant, when I discover whether you’ve earned her.”
Scammell’s eyes seemed to flare with a defiant rage, then the ingrained respect owed to an officer took over. “Earned her, sir?” The Sergeant glanced into the cell. “You wouldn’t say that was proof …”
“When I discover whether the man told you the truth.”
“He told the truth.” Scammell was stubborn.
“I’ll have to find that out for myself, won’t I?” Vane heard the whipcrack of authority coming back into his voice. “In the meantime, Sergeant, you’ll tell no one.”
“I ain’t a choirboy like your Sam, am I?” Scammell’s tone was scathing.
“No, you’re not.” Vane walked away from the cell, going to tell the lies that would explain murder, but also taking the name of Davie Logan that was the next stepping stone on this bloody path. Logan. Vane wondered how in hell’s name he was to find the distant Logan, yet discover the ferryman he must, for, just as Lynch had led to Logan, so Logan would lead to the next traitor, then the next, until the traitor in the city was at Vane’s mercy and could never again betray the King’s cause. In which cause Captain Vane had stepped on the path of horror, but he had done it willingly, for it could lead to victory.
Thirty-Two
General Charles Lee, no longer arrayed as a Polish cavalry general but in the duller uniform of the Continental Army, took his leave of Philadelphia in late April. A travelling coach had been provided for his comfort, and its rack was heaped with gifts from British officers. There were cases of wine packed in sawdust, two hams, a cask of pickled oysters, and a fine pair of riding boots made by Sir William’s London bootmakers. “They’ll help you run away all the faster, Charlie.”
“I shall miss you, sir, indeed I shall.” Lee embraced Sir William, then kissed Mrs Loring. “Dear Lizzie, I cannot persuade you to accompany me?”
“We’ll take you prisoner again soon enough, Charlie.”
“You make promises so easily.” Lee again clutched Sir William to him. The sorrow of parting was genuine.
“Inform General Washington of my peace proposals!” Sir William admonished.
“I shall, sir! I shall encourage him!” Lee swung himself into the saddle of Sir William’s own horse. Lee would ride the first dozen miles on the borrowed mare, and only then would he use the travelling coach which, despite the day’s heat, had leather curtains drawn tight behind its windows.
A half-dozen staff officers, Christopher Vane, John Andre and Lord Robert Massedene among them, would ride the first leg of the journey with the exchanged rebel General. On the previous night a mixed force of British infantry and Loyalist cavalry had marched to attack a rebel encampment at an upcountry tavern called the Crooked Billet, and the staff officers, released for the day, would accompany Lee that far then come back with the returning troops. Six servants, including Private Sam Gilpin, carried food and wine for a farewell luncheon in the open air.
“Who are you hiding in the coach, Charlie?” Sir William’s question was jocular.
“A dozen of your deserters, sir.”
Sir William laughed. “God bless you, Charlie.”
“And you, sir.” The two men shook hands, then the coachman cracked his whip and the horses clattered out of the yard on to Market Street. Lee and the British officers rode ahead, while the servants stayed behind the lurching coach.
Lee’s entourage made a happy cavalcade. The officers displayed their horsemanship in the city’s streets, then galloped for sheer joy through the Northern Liberties. For once the countryside to the north was known to be free of rebel patrols, and the red-coated young men could ride with abandon.
It was the year’s first such day of careless freedom. All spring the rebel patrols had ambushed and galled the forage parties that still sought hoarded food fro
m the northern farms. As the weather warmed, and as the land became easier for horsemen, so the rebel activity had increased. Bitter skirmishes left Redcoats dead in scrub and farmland. In the forests between the small fields the Americans were at home, and red-coated companies, trained to the close-order drill of the open battlefield, lumbered clumsy and vulnerable. The rebels, becoming accustomed to victory, jeered at their floundering enemy.
But victory had made them overconfident. On the day before Lee left to rejoin Washington’s army, the rebel patrols came together to make a force of over fifteen hundred men. They had planned to sweep the country close to the city’s defence line and to attack the wood-cutting parties that daily dragged cooking fuel back to the beleaguered city.
But a Loyalist farmer had brought news of the gathering to the city, and the British, vouchsafed their enemy’s whereabouts, had marched to make the night attack. “It looks,” Lord Robert Massedene spurred to ride alongside Vane and pointed towards a smear of smoke that rose above the spring-brightened horizon, “as if we’ve been successful.”
“We’d know by now if they’d failed,” Vane said curtly. He still disliked Massedene, and that dislike was still fed by the jealousy which the Widow had provoked the previous autumn, but, working so closely together in Sir William’s entourage, the two officers could not ignore each other. Vane treated his lordship with a wary politeness, while Massedene, to Vane’s secret displeasure, constantly behaved as though the two had never been estranged. Massedene thus irritated Vane now. “You seemed recovered this morning, Vane?”
“Recovered?”
“We all thought you were feverish these last few days. Billy was quite worried!”
Vane instantly remembered the twitching and bloody thing in the asylum cell. The guilt, like a slithering beast coiled in his belly, stirred cold and he rowelled his horse ahead so that Massedene should not see his face. “It was a touch of cold, my lord, nothing more.”
“Billy thought you were fretting for action.”
Redcoat Page 35