The flooding tide raised the ship, bringing ever closer the moment when she would turn her blunt bows to the sea and take her cargo across the huge waters where Jonathon would be far from rebellion and far from his love. He searched the river for a shallop, but did not see it.
The gulls shrieked above hatches being battened down for sea. The wind freshened, and Jonathon waited for the night during which, he swore, he would escape this ship and the long fate of exile that his uncle had so cleverly arranged. He would not go to London, he would not be driven from his country; he would escape.
Thirty-Five
Captain Christopher Vane, after delivering the pass that had been Abel Becket’s price for the help Vane needed, was forced to wait until the foreman had finished a discussion with a tall grey-haired man whose face twitched in a series of uncontrollable tics. Woollard, conscious that the red-coated officer waited for him, drew out the discussion which ended when Woollard handed the grey-haired man a bag of money.
Vane, when Woollard at last was free, nodded at the foreman. “You remember me?”
“Indeed, sir.” Woollard, picking up a knife and a tallystick, did not look at the Englishman, but instead watched the timber being swung aboard.
“Mr Becket suggested you would talk with me,” Vane said.
“He said you needed help,” Woollard said bluntly, then looked challengingly at the British officer. “And that you were paying for it by releasing young Jonathon?”
“True.” Vane followed the foreman to the ship’s starboard rail where, from between two salt-encrusted cannons, Woollard could watch the loading continue. “Do you disapprove?” Vane asked.
“Disapprove?” Woollard gave a humourless laugh. “If Master Jonathon’s going to share this business, then the more he knows of trade the better. Though I doubt he still has either the leaning or the liking for it, but good luck rarely comes to the deserving, does it? What the hell’s that?”
The last question had been directed at a naval longboat that was being rowed past the Deirdre-Ann’s counter. The boat, painted white, had been gilded about its gunwales, while a carved swan’s head, unpainted as yet, reared above the bows.
“It’s for the Meschianza,” Vane offered in lame explanation. “There’s going to be a parade of boats.”
“The Meschianza?” Woollard had difficulty in pronouncing the odd word.
“A celebration for Sir William’s departure.”
“I wish you’d celebrate hanging George Washington.” All Woollard’s scorn for the frippery of the city’s high social life was apparent. Like other Philadelphians, he could not understand why so much money and time were being expended on a lavish celebration while the rebel army was still uncrushed. Yet, however much Woollard might resent English airs and graces, he had the reputation of being a staunch Tory, and he had been ordered by Abel Becket to answer Vane’s questions. “I know Davie Logan well enough,” the foreman assured Vane. “We sold him his shallop four years back, and the devil’s own job we had to get the money from him.”
“Do you know where I’ll find him?”
Woollard did not answer until he had cut another notch in his tallystick to record the safe lading of a timber stack, then, in a churlish voice, he said that Logan had a house up beyond Pennypack Creek.
“I know that.” Vane was finding it hard to keep asperity from his voice. “But I want to know where he berths in the city.”
Woollard’s expression suggested that Captain Vane’s ignorance was somehow pathetic. “Logan owes too much money in this city to risk berthing at a Philadelphia wharf. No, Captain, he’s using a middleman.”
It was the first relevant information that Vane had gleaned from this uncomfortable interview, yet, if it was progress, it was also dispiriting. Vane had come here believing that all he needed to do was find Logan, and that Logan would lead him to the Widow, and now he had discovered another link in the chain. He hid his disappointment. “A middleman?”
Woollard stared at Vane as though he were mad, then, with an insolent slowness, he turned towards the New Jersey shore and spat towards it. “Over there, Captain.”
“Explain!” Vane put some of the snap of command into his voice.
Woollard, affronted by the tone, took his time, but he had been ordered to this task by his master so, with whatever bad grace he could muster, he explained how the farmers of Pennsylvania found it difficult to trade with the city because their roads into Philadelphia were heavily patrolled by rebel forces only too ready to use the whip. It was much easier, Woollard said, for the farmers in New Jersey because, not only were there fewer rebel patrols, but they merely had to ship their goods to the river bank opposite the city. That could not be construed as supplying the enemy, because, until a week before, the British had not occupied the New Jersey bank. Once at the New Jersey shore of the river, the produce was sold to local people who, in turn, sailed it across the Delaware to Philadelphia’s market. “The middlemen,” Woollard explained, “who make a profit out of our hunger.”
“So Logan carries produce to Cooper’s Point?”
“Near enough.” Woollard sounded laconic as he cut another notch in his tallystick.
“To any particular person at Cooper’s Point?”
The foreman paused. “I don’t like Davie Logan,” Woollard said eventually, “but he’s a waterman on my river, and one good day, Captain, he’ll be a customer of mine again, and I don’t want folks saying that Ezra Woollard betrayed a riverman.”
The words had been said as a challenge, and Vane felt a flare of temper that almost made him command the answers he wanted. He resisted the temptation, suspecting that such a command would only make this big man even more stubborn. Woollard might be loyal to his watermen, but Becket was certain he was also loyal to his King, and Vane must trust that the latter allegiance was stronger than the former. “I have reason to believe,” Vane said carefully, “that Davie Logan is an enemy of the Crown.”
“There are plenty of those enemies, Captain.” Woollard’s voice was neutral.
“I also believe,” Vane hid his irritation, “that Logan delivers messages to Philadelphia on the rebels’ behalf.”
“Not Logan,” Woollard said, “but his middleman.”
Woollard’s obtuseness was aggravating Vane, but he accepted the distinction. “If you say so.”
And Woollard, for the first time since the conversation had begun, gave a small smile. He turned, leaning on the rail to stare north towards the great bend of the river. “You see that small pier up there? Not the ferry pier, but the smaller one this side of it?”
Vane could just see, at the far side of the glittering reach, a ramshackle timber jetty that prodded into the water from the New Jersey bank. A leaning branch marked a shoal just beyond the pier, and Vane pointed to it. “Where the perch is?”
“Aye.” Woollard spat over the side. “And if you watch, Captain, you’ll see a fair-haired slut sail a boat from that pier. A young girl. She’s called Fisher.”
“Fisher?”
“Caroline Fisher.”
Vane wrote the name down. Sam’s girl was called Caroline, he remembered, then Vane thrust that irrelevant thought out of his mind. “And this Fisher girl …”
“She’s a rebel.” Woollard seemed to grimace as he said it. “She’s a flaunting, insolent, devil of a girl, Captain.”
“And she lives at Cooper’s Point?”
“A half-mile south, with her grandparents.” Woollard, turning back to check on the cargo, glanced at Vane’s notebook. “Caleb and Anna Fisher, they’re farmers of a sort.”
Vane wrote the names down. “Also rebels?”
Woollard shrugged. “Depends which way the wind blows, doesn’t it? I always thought Caleb was a Tory, but he reared a rebel granddaughter.”
“And Davie Logan trades with them?”
“They sell his produce. But I don’t doubt they take a few shillings off the top of each barrel.”
Vane closed the book an
d pushed it into the tail pocket of his uniform coat. “I would be most grateful, Mister Woollard, if you would keep the details of our conversation private.”
Woollard offered Vane his second smile. “If my keeping quiet, Captain, leads to the punishment of that damned girl, then I’ll keep silence till Doomsday.”
Vane heard the echoes of an old lust. He smiled. “I assure you, Mister Woollard, that, if it is deserved, she will be punished.”
Woollard nodded and cut another notch in the tally. “She hasn’t been coming to the city much of late, but she’s here today.” He jerked his chin northwards. “You’ll see her boat at Painter’s Wharf. A new shallop, with a higher bow than most and a white sternpost.”
“She brings the produce to market?” Vane guessed.
Woollard nodded. “And to some private houses.”
Vane drew a bow at a venture. “Mrs Martha Crowl, perhaps?”
Woollard gave him a sharp glance. Vane’s arrow, shot in the air, had fallen plumb on target. “Aye,” Woollard spoke slowly, “she goes to the Widow’s house. That’s where she met the cripple and bewitched him. And it was the Widow who bought her the new shallop.”
Vane knew now. Vane knew! The enemy lay revealed before him. He felt the soaring exultation of success, but hid it behind a calm, measured expression. “You’ve been very helpful. I thank you.”
“If you need the slut whipped, ask me. But she’s a slippery devil. If you cross the river, Captain, she’ll like as not disappear in those woods.” Woollard’s earlier surliness had been replaced by a grim helpfulness. “You’ll talk to her today, perhaps?”
“I doubt it.” Vane was unprepared for any such confrontation, and did not want to alert the girl to his suspicions. “But if you see her come to the city in the next few days, you can let me know? A message at Sir William’s headquarters will always reach me.”
“I’ll do that.”
Vane smiled his thanks. “Do you have time to show me Painter’s Wharf?”
Woollard shook his head. “I have to stay aboard, captain, till she casts off.” He nodded meaningfully towards the cabin where Jonathon was immured, and Vane, understanding, walked down to the quay where the evening’s shadows lengthened from bollards and cables.
He sauntered up the busy wharves. Sentries and gunners manning the centre battery saluted him and Vane casually touched his hand to a tip of his cocked hat. A drunken seaman reeled out of his way. A cauldron of caulking pitch boiled on one quay, shimmering the air above with its seething heat. Vane stepped over coiled ropes, fish traps and mooring rings. Great ships towered above him, their holds busy. A sailor threw slops from the side of a merchantman and a tumble of gulls shrieked down from the sky. The dockside whores watched Vane with bruised, dark eyes and ignored a preacher who, bible in hand and earnestness on his young face, tried to mend their ways. The smell of hemp came from a ropewalk where a gang of Negroes twisted a vast windlass to make a cable that could hold a fully laden ship against a tempest’s destruction.
The northernmost quays were too small for the great ships, so it was there that the shallops and flatboats were crowded together in filthy docks. Baskets of fish were being hoisted from the boats to be spilt into barrels in cascades of silver. A woman offered Vane a sack of oysters. This was where the city’s food came, but, except for the fish market, the warehouses were sadly empty. Philadelphia must wait until the turning year swelled the crops. Vane turned back to the oyster seller and paid her a shilling for the sack. “Which is Painter’s Wharf, ma’am?”
“Second from the end.”
Vane found the wharf and strolled to the dock’s edge. A dozen shallops, their sails bent on to booms, jostled in the littered water beneath him. One had a limewashed sternpost and a high, flared bow. It was the boat the Widow had bought, and Vane knew he was seeing, in Caroline’s neat shallop, a rebel weapon.
Vane abruptly turned away. At the very end of the wharves where a brick wall edged the northern shipyards, another British battery, protected by a crude parapet of undressed stone, faced the river. Vane walked to it. “Mind if I take the air, Sergeant?”
The sergeant in charge hid his chagrin at being disturbed by some strange officer. “Honoured, sir.”
“I thought your men might like some oysters?”
“Thank you, sir.”
Vane smiled at the gunners who, before he came, had been lolling beside their weapons with lit pipes. They had hastily extinguished the tobacco when his epaulettes appeared. “Carry on smoking, lads! I’m sure you know the dangers better than I do!”
The sergeant, grateful for such solicitousness, grinned. “Guns ain’t loaded, sir.”
“They’re not?”
“Ain’t seen a rebel in six months!”
An old battered spyglass, used for watching the fall of shot, lay on the firestep. Vane took it, slid the brass shutters from the outer lenses, and stared across the river. The small riverside hamlet of Camden slipped past the glass as he panned the instrument left. The land between Camden and Cooper’s Point, Vane saw, was thickly wooded, but he could just see a handful of weather-boarded houses tucked into the trees. Further to the left, beyond the outfall of the Cooper River, he could see the timber palisade of the small British wood-cutting garrison. It had been placed there a week before, a tiny fortress that edged the vast woodlands which could provide timber for Philadelphia’s cooking fires. There were few rebel patrols to disturb the felling parties. Vane, staring through the spyglass, could see Redcoats pulling buckets of water from the river.
Vane lowered the glass and settled comfortably into one of the gun embrasures. The peak of his cocked hat shadowed his face. The wind was chill, but he was sheltered in the embrasure and happy to wait till dusk if it was necessary. The river flowed beneath him, its sound oddly comforting.
The shallop with the white sternpost appeared a half-hour later. Vane, lulled to a semi-sleep, did not notice it, but the sergeant, made familiar because of Vane’s friendly behaviour, drew the officer’s attention to the boat. “That one’s worth a look, sir.”
“Sergeant?” Vane was startled awake.
“Not the boat, sir. The doxie. A proper darling, she is.”
Vane pulled the glass open and trained it. For a second all he could see was the dark red blur of the loose-sheeted sail, then he focused the telescope properly and edged it sideways until he could see a girl twisting a single scull over the shallop’s stern. She controlled the boat with a careless skill. Her back was turned to the battery and Vane had an impulse to shout a pleasantry that would make the girl turn round. He bit the words back. If this girl was one of the traitors who had drawn the Hessians to bloody ruin at Fort Mercer, then Vane would rather stay unremarked and unsuspected.
The freshening wind hit the sail as the shallop cleared the lee of the high wharves and Vane watched as the girl shipped the scull inboard and sat to the tiller.
She had to turn to sit, and the spyglass was suddenly filled with her face. Vane immediately recognized her, and hissed with astonishment.
“She is a little darling.” The sergeant heard the indrawn breath and took it for admiration. “Keeps it to herself, though. Bleeding waste, if you ask me.”
Caroline Fisher. Sam’s Caroline. Vane stared. She seemed even prettier now than when he had met her in the church. He saw a girl with sun-bleached hair and bright eyes; a face to launch a thousand shallops on the waters of lust. A girl to love and leave, but now a girl who must be hunted and punished, and Vane felt a beat of excitement at that thought. And what, he wondered, was Sam doing with such a girl? She was not a kitchenmaid at all, but a rebel who took her unsuspected boat in and out of a British garrison.
The girl turned and stared straight into the lens. Vane almost turned the telescope away, then realized that the clumsy instrument hid his face to stop the girl from identifying him. He pretended to be nothing but an idle and salacious scrutineer and, recognizing it, the girl first laughed, then thumbed her nose at him.
“A spirited trollop,” Vane said.
“But keeps it to herself, sir.”
“As you said.” As the girl turned away, Vane collapsed the glass and twisted out of the embrasure. “Do you ever search the shallops?”
“Wouldn’t mind searching her, sir. No, not really. Once in a while we root about the bilges, but you never find nothing.”
To the south, from the bigger wharves, the Deirdre-Ann warped herself into the river. Vane saw the topsails drop to the wind and heard their great thump as the seamen hauled on sheets. The first ripples of a long passage appeared at the merchantman’s stern.
Vane glanced once more at Caroline’s shallop, but it was far off now, tacking towards the ramshackle pier below Cooper’s Point. Sam, Vane thought, Sam. Honest Sam, so upright and honest Sam, but treacherous as well? Vane’s first instinct was to find Sam and to order the truth from him. Then a wiser thought came to Vane’s head. This day’s new knowledge was secret, and was best kept secret till it could be useful. Vane turned to look at the gunnery sergeant. “You’d recognize the girl again?”
“Gawd, yes, sir!”
“I might ask you to give her a message, Sergeant.”
The sergeant, entirely but quite naturally misunderstanding Vane’s intentions, grinned. “Of course, sir.”
“Her name is Miss Fisher.” Vane ignored the insinuation in the sergeant’s expression. “Until I tell you, I don’t want her troubled. And when you do give her the message, you don’t mention me. Understand? You say it’s from someone called Sam. Just Sam.” Vane handed the telescope to the sergeant. “I may not ask you to do it for some days, Sergeant, but there’ll be a guinea in it for you. What’s your name?”
“Pollock, sir.”
“Good-night, Sergeant Pollock.”
“Good-night, sir.”
Lynch had led to Logan, Vane thought, and Logan to Caroline, and Caroline went straight to the Widow’s house in a boat that the Widow had purchased. So now an insolent rejection could be balanced by revenge, and all Vane needed was the proof. And Sam, treacherous Sam, would provide the means. Vane went to that evening’s pleasures a happy man.
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