Prelude to Glory, Vol. 4

by Ron Carter

  “You’re looking for your father?” The man pursed his mouth and shook his head. “Can’t help you with that.”

  “If he came here on one of your ships, you should have a record, shouldn’t you?”

  An irritated frown crossed his face. “Ma’am, New York is under British blockade. Things happen. Sometimes no one keeps records. Sometimes they get lost.”

  “I arrived on a ship from New York two days ago without trouble.”

  “Then she was flying a foreign flag. Our ships don’t. We fly American colors, and we have to run the British blockade out of New York at night.”

  “Could you look in your records for January?”

  His eyes flickered to her purse once again, and he shook his head. “Come back later. Maybe Monday, or Tuesday. Maybe I’ll have time then.”

  “Could I have your name, please?”

  His eyes slid over her purse once more. “Ma’am, I’ve got to finish checking the manifest of a ship that docked six days ago and it won’t wait. She’s loading now to sail out. Come back later.”

  Mary placed her hand over her mouth to stifle a cough, then leaned forward, hands on the edge of the desk. “Sir, it’s urgent that I find my father as soon as possible. He’s elderly. Hours are important.”

  He recoiled from her. “What’s that cough? Tuberculosis? Smallpox? Plague? We’ve got enough trouble on these docks without an epidemic.”

  “No. I had pneumonia. It’s nearly gone.”

  “Nearly?”

  Mary’s eyebrows peaked. “Sir, if you could just look for one name in the records of the ships that arrived here last December and January, I’ll be gone. There couldn’t have been more than two or three of them.”

  The man shook his head and started to speak when Mary cut him off. “I can pay.” She settled her purse on the desk before him.

  The man eyed the heavy purse. “You’ve got money?”

  “How much is your demand?”

  He reached thick fingers to scratch a jowl. “Well, if I look right now I won’t get out of here until maybe nine o’clock tonight, maybe ten. Three, four hours late. Considering the load of work, that ought to be worth, shall we say, ten pounds sterling.”

  Mary straightened in shock. “Ten pounds?”

  He leaned forward and thrust a finger toward her. “You want to know about your father or not? It makes no difference to me.”

  Mary loosened the drawstring on her purse and quickly counted the money, then held it clutched tightly in her hand as she spoke. “When you have finished your search, I will give you the money. Not before.”

  He waved a hand as though to brush the matter from his mind. “Now, or leave.”

  She stepped back from the desk. “No.”

  He dropped his hand. “Feisty, eh. All right, we’ll see. What’s your father’s name?”

  “Rufus Broadhead. He probably had two people with him.”

  “What names?”

  “Sarah and Michael.”

  “Last names?”

  “No last names. They are servants.”

  The man drew open a large desk drawer and lifted out a worn leather-bound ledger with the words ARRIVALS—DEPARTURES stamped on the cover, laid it on the desk, and opened it. He turned pages until he came to one with the date of January 22, 1777, scrolled in ink at the top. Beneath the date was the word Orpha. He mumbled to himself, reading, as he traced the entries with his finger. His finger stopped, and he blanched as he raised his face, his eyes locking with Mary’s.

  “Rufus Broadhead?”

  Mary’s breath came short. “Yes.”

  Slowly he closed the book. “Rufus Broadhead and two unnamed persons with him were on the Orpha. She sailed out of New York at twenty minutes past one o’clock a.m., on January ninth, this year. The British saw her as she cleared the blockade. Two gunboats followed her and ordered her to heave to. She refused, and they opened fire. They left her burning and sinking with the captain dead and half the crew dead or wounded. The first mate got the fires out and brought her here. We salvaged some of her cargo, but the ship was beyond repair. We towed her out three miles and scuttled her. There is an insurance claim pending.”

  Mary’s voice cracked as she asked, “My father?”

  The man shook his head. “All passengers were killed by British gunfire. Your father is dead.” His face softened. “I’m sorry.”

  Mary gasped and grabbed the front of the desk for support. “Dead? That can’t be.”

  “Regrettably, it is true. There was no one to claim the body, so it was delivered for burial in the pauper’s cemetery.”

  Mary gasped and took a step backwards. “Father? In the pauper’s cemetery? He had money!” She clamped her mouth shut, and her body shook as she battled to hold back the tears.

  “Everything he had with him was lost when the ship caught fire.”

  For long moments Mary stared, chin trembling. Then, without a word she dropped the ten-pound note on the desk, turned on her heel, and walked out of the office, west, into the setting sun. Hardened dock hands stopped to look as she walked past, eyes straight ahead, mouth set. Dark was gathering as she left the waterfront, walked steadily toward the Bluebell Inn, and went directly to her room.

  Inside she collapsed on the bed while tears flowed, and her heart-wrenching sobs filled the room. It was dark before she rose and lighted the lamp on the table beside the bed, then sat down in the rocking chair in the corner to begin a slow rocking, still fully dressed, her spring bonnet tied beneath her chin. Sometime after one o’clock, her chin slowly settled on her chest, and the rocking slowed and stopped as she nodded into an exhausted sleep.

  With the lamp glowing yellow in the gray dawn light of the room, she jerked awake and for a moment could not recall where she was or how she got there. Then the remembrance came welling up, and she laid her head back and let the tears flow. After a time she rose and pushed the window curtains aside to peer out at a sun half-risen, turning the underside of a high skiff of clouds gold and rose-pink in another beautiful spring day in Boston Town. Slowly she untied her bonnet and dropped it in the chair, then sat on her bed, staring at her hands in her lap while trying to form a plan.

  I will find father, and I will have him buried in New York beside mother. And then what? There’s no one. Father and mother, their estate, all gone. Marcus—my husband—gone, my baby, gone. Marcus’s family, all gone, the house burned. Doctor Purcell, gone. Left me with some money, but where do I go? To whom? What do I do?

  The sharp hacking cough came for a moment, and she covered her mouth until it stopped.

  Doctor Purcell taught me much about nursing. I can find work in a hospital. Perhaps a military hospital, helping our wounded soldiers.

  From the recesses of her mind came two images, sharp and clear. Her breathing constricted, and she clasped a trembling hand to her breast.

  Eli! Billy and Eli!

  She saw Billy’s square, blocky face. Solid, plain, dependable Billy, and she yearned to be near him, to feel his quiet strength and his innate goodness.

  Then she saw the face of Eli—the hawk nose, the cleft in his chin, and the look in his eyes of one who had long known unutterable pain. She felt once more the deep, disturbing fascination of something wild and untamed in him, something as native to him as the vast primeval forest from whence he had come.

  “Eli,” she whispered, and for the first time she understood that somehow her heart, that of a woman raised in wealth and high social status in New York City, had become entwined with his—he a man raised wild and free by Iroquois Indians in the wilderness. She stiffened at the thought. A New York socialite woman raised in a mansion, dressed in silks and satins, and a man from the forest, raised in an Indian wigwam or longhouse, dressed in buckskins and moccasins, carrying a tomahawk, knife, and rifle. She could not force the two worlds to come together in her mind.

  Suddenly the implications of her thoughts struck into her consciousness, and she sat bolt upright, eyes wide in
shock. My world and his? Myself and Eli? Had Doctor Purcell been right? Had he seen what I could not see? Am I in love with Eli? Am I?

  Forgotten things came flooding with a force of their own, and she let them come. That day in August last year when Eli and Billy unloaded the ammunition from my wagon into the Manhattan Island magazine—something different—I thought it was the buckskin hunting shirt and the beaded moccasins. The night we moved the army from Manhattan to Long Island with the dead man tied behind us on the wagon—how right it seemed to tell him about the death of my husband and my baby—learning of him watching his family killed when he was two years old—taken by the Iroquois—raised by them—my tears—his gentle arm about my shoulders while I wept—so natural, so natural. The day at Fort Washington when I learned Josephus Tanner had heard of an orphaned girl taken in by a minister eighteen years ago—perhaps his sister—the leap of hope in his eyes when I told him—and the night on the ship in New York harbor when I learned the minister was named Cyrus Fielding—I could not wait to have Doctor Purcell write to Eli—tell him—and the hope that sprang in my heart that perhaps I had done something to help him find what was left of his family—my prayers for him—all so natural.

  She reined in her thoughts and her feelings and slowly faced the question that she had refused to articulate until now.

  Love? Do I love him? Me, from my world, and he, raised by savages? Can it be true?

  It was as though the facing of the question tapped into a wellspring of emotions that had been hidden from her, and they came flooding to overwhelm her, leaving her stunned, silent, uncomprehending. She saw his face and suddenly knew she yearned to see him, talk with him, feel his strong arm about her shoulder once again, feel his inner strength as she buried her face in his shoulder to sob out her pain, share her innermost joys and fears with him, touch his face, and assure him they would find his sister, make his life complete once more.

  She did not know nor care how long she sat on her bed, mesmerized by the soul-shaking realization that had changed her forever. All questions of where she belonged, and what she would do with the years remaining in her life, were gone in the brilliant light of knowing who she was and where she was going.

  She stood. I must move father to be beside mother in New York. And then I will find out where General Washington is camped with the army. Surely he has a hospital there, where I can work. I will go there, and if Eli is alive, I will find him.

  Notes

  Mary Flint, as she appears herein, is a fictional person, although the name is taken from a woman whose true name was Mary Flint. She lived in the hamlet of Lincoln, near Lexington and Concord, and upon the request of Paul Revere, she left her children with a servant and rode to warn her neighbors of the approach of the British regulars on the night of April 18, 1775 (see Flint and Flint, Flint Family History of the Adventuresome Seven, pp. 87–91).

  In this book, her father, Rufus Broadhead, is also fictional, as is Doctor Otis Purcell.

  Quebec, Canada

  June 7, 1777

  CHAPTER V

  * * *

  I expected one thousand Indians, mostly Mohawk, for the Albany campaign. I am informed this morning that I will be fortunate to get four hundred.”

  With sober, narrowed eyes, Burgoyne, dashing, resplendent in his fresh uniform with gold piping gilding the lapels, shifted his weight on the woven leather-strap seat of the straight-backed chair facing General Carleton’s desk, while his words echoed in the cavernous office. His face a blank, Carleton leaned back in his upholstered chair, saying nothing, giving Burgoyne free rein to continue. From outside the great, brooding Quebec Castle came the first distant rumble of thunder from the southwest, where thick, purple, June storm clouds were sweeping down the St. Lawrence River. Burgoyne waited until the sound faded and Carleton’s office was silent once again.

  “My understanding was that the Chevalier St. Luc de la Corne and Charles Langlade were capable of bringing in one thousand Indians.” He paused, eyes locked with Carleton, whose face was expressionless while he remained silent. Burgoyne forced the issue.

  “Was I misinformed about St. Luc and Langlade?”

  Carleton leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “I have no idea who suggested they could raise one thousand Indians. I believe my advice was, if anyone can raise Indians to be scouts and guides for your campaign, it would be St. Luc and Langlade. I have never presumed to tell you how many, certainly not one thousand. I recall advising that white men simply do not understand how to control and handle Indians.”

  He paused, eyes boring into Burgoyne’s. “And I repeat that advice. Call it a warning. The foundations of Indian thought have little to do with those of white men. That which is acceptable, reasonable, logical to them, is all too often a mystery to us. Their value to you will be as your eyes and ears in the forest, guides, and advance skirmishers. Restrict them to those services, and they will be of great help. If you are not able to do that, you will very likely wish you had never brought them along.”

  Carleton leaned back in his chair, watching Burgoyne’s eyes for reaction, and he saw little that suggested Burgoyne understood or accepted the hard warning. He felt a growing sense of apprehension, nearly fear, for Burgoyne. He leaned forward once more.

  “Let me tell you about St. Luc and Langlade. Langlade is a Frenchman, and one of the most skilled forest fighters and interpreters in the area. It was Langlade who made and executed the plan that totally destroyed General Edward Braddock’s army near the Ohio River in 1755. Need I recall to you that massacre?”

  Burgoyne said nothing but slowly leaned back in his chair. Carleton continued. “As for St. Luc, he is now about sixty-six years old, but is as capable as a man half his age. He was twenty-one when he left his wealthy, privileged family here in Quebec to go fight the Sauk and Fox Indians. He was one of the leaders in the attack on Saratoga when they burned every building at the garrison and took one hundred captives. He was with the party that attacked Deerfield—burned the entire settlement to the ground—massacred everyone there. He raided Albany and Schenectady. It was St. Luc who ambushed a British wagon train and took eighty scalps and sixty-four prisoners. In 1757, with the Marquis de Montcalm’s army, he led eighteen hundred Indians, who took a great number of English prisoners. He was in charge of escorting them when his Indians found liquor in a fort they destroyed. They got drunk and went wild. When they finished the butchering, sixty-nine of the prisoners were dead, scalped, mutilated.”

  Carleton paused to let Burgoyne ponder the horrors of the story, then continued. “He has become wealthy dealing in furs and in the slave trade. He speaks at least five Indian languages, as well as French and English, and is an excellent interpreter. There is no atrocity he does not know, and he has been generous in exercising all of them at his pleasure. He is the devil incarnate when it comes to scalping and mutilations. He is known on both sides of the Atlantic, and is the white man most capable of gathering Indian war parties, simply because the Indians have learned he will indulge them with plunder, scalps, and liquor, if they find it. Be warned, it is not money or loyalty that will bring in the Indians and hold them in line. It is the hope of scalps, plunder, and all too often, liquor. If you were to ask your regulars, particularly your Germans, who they fear the most, the rebellious Americans or the Indians, their honest answer would be the Indians.”

  “Do you include the Indians we have recruited? The ones who are serving with our army?”

  “Most emphatically. Ask your troops. Watch them. When your Indians are close by, your regulars will never be far from their weapons, and their eyes will never leave the Indians until they have gone. Mark my words!”

  The sky had darkened, and three miles up the river, jagged lightning tore through the thick, black rain clouds. Moments later, rolling thunder drowned out all sounds. Burgoyne remained still, and Carleton gathered his thoughts until it quieted.

  Carleton went on “I now repeat to you what I said previously. If any
one can raise the one thousand Indians you desire, it will be St. Luc and Langlade. If they cannot do it, then it cannot be done.” He cleared his throat. “I believe I have said enough to provoke some sense of the realities of dealing with our red brothers.”

  Burgoyne slowly sat upright in his chair. “Indeed. Indeed. Do the Americans share this morbid fear of the Indians?”

  Carleton nodded his head vigorously. “They do, and rightfully so.”

  Burgoyne glanced down at a small document on which he had written notes, and Carleton settled back, studying Burgoyne, waiting for him to move on.

  Burgoyne cleared his throat. “I was advised by Philip Skene that there were large numbers of Canadians in this area, loyal to the Crown, who would be eager to sign up for duty as freighters and cartdrivers and to repair the forts at Sorel, St. Johns, and Ile aux Noix. Mr. Skene served as a brigade major with General Amherst, and has extensive land holdings at the south end of Lake Champlain. I presumed he would be of sound judgment, so I commissioned two men, John Peters and Ebenezer Jessup, to recruit two thousand of Mr. Skene’s loyalists.”

  Burgoyne glanced again at his notes, then continued. “Peters and Jessup appeared to have the credentials and the desire for the job, but I am now told they have assembled only three companies, one hundred men to the company, under the command of three officers: a Major Samuel McKay, Captain Rene Boucherville, and Captain David Monin, and I understand that at least thirty of those men have deserted. If Mr. Skene was correct in his judgment, why are we facing a critical shortage of necessary labor?” His expression was very close to being accusatory.

  Carleton shook his head. “The truth is, the question of how many loyalists are available is one thing, and the question of how willing they are to forsake their villages and their families to join your campaign is another. There are many who feel strong ties to England, but when it comes to taking up your cause against their homeland and some of their neighbors, loyalty to king and crown fades rather quickly. Last winter they moved hundreds of tons of supplies to St. Johns to prepare for your campaign, and last month they interrupted their critical spring planting to haul more supplies to St. Johns. They know this campaign will continue through the summer, and they have no enthusiasm for anything that will take them away from their farms and crops during the growing months. They depend on the corn, oats, wheat, rye, and barley. If their crops fail, next winter will be a disaster for them. I’m afraid Mr. Skene could have been swayed in his judgment by the fact that he has a fortune in landholdings around the south end of the lake, which will be in jeopardy if you fail in this campaign.”