But they all breathed secret sighs of relief when they reached the main road at last. ‘Reckon it’ll get dark kind of soon tonight.’ Jed, who was driving the sledge, voiced an anxiety that Mercy and Barnes had silently shared.
‘Yup,’ said Barnes. ‘I wouldn’t mind if it was to stop snowing now. I’m not dead sure how often Cousin Joe clears his track. But I know it like the back of my hand.’ He turned with hurried but not entirely convincing reassurance to Mercy. ‘And the turnoff. And by golly, there it is! Turn ‘em easy, Jed boy, right by that clump of firs. The road’s posted all the way.’
‘How high are the posts?’ asked Jed.
‘High enough, I hope.’ Barnes leaned forward, peering anxiously ahead through the dwindling light that was reducing the landscape to a dangerous grey sameness. ‘I reckon I’d best get down and lead the horses. Looks like the snow’s pretty deep.’
‘It certainly is.’ Like him, Mercy had noticed that when the track dipped into a hollow, the posts marking it were almost hidden by drifting snow. And the light was failing moment by moment.
‘Not long now.’ Barnes looked exhausted, and she was angry with herself for giving way when he had insisted on tying his horse behind the sledge and joining them on this dangerous first stage of their journey. On the other hand, would they ever have managed without him and this useful cousin of his? Would they manage now? The sledge was moving at a snail’s pace, as Barnes groped his way through heavily drifted snow. To distract her mind from the instant, immediate anxiety, she made herself face another. She had only, with luck, and thanks to Barnes and his friends, enough money to get her little party to Philadelphia. So – what then? Her best hope was that one of Georgia’s representatives at the Continental Congress would be prepared to help them, but she knew it for a forlorn one. In Georgia’s present chaotic state, it would be a miracle if representatives had even been elected, still less made the long, hazardous journey through the war-torn Carolinas to Philadelphia.
But perhaps nothing had come of the rumoured British attack on Charleston. If Charleston was still free, and the Mayfield house standing, she had only to get them there, and they would have a home where she could surely find work to support them all. If she dared. Remembering the British capture and the French siege of Savannah, she shivered with more than cold. Ruth was in no state to be exposed to such an experience. Was she mad to have taken on the added burden of Ruth? Well, mad or sane, there was nothing else she could have done.
It was a relief when a cheerful shout from Barnes brought her back from these gloomy thoughts to the cold present and the happy sight of lights ahead. Joe Meigs and his plump, silent wife welcomed Barnes with enthusiasm and his friends with hospitable kindness and a blessed dearth of questions. That they were friends of Barnes’s was good enough for Meigs, but, like Mercy he was anxious about Barnes’s haggard appearance, which Barnes attributed to an accident the day before.
‘Not like you to have accidents,’ was his cousin’s reply, and Mercy wondered what he really thought and was grateful for his pointed abstinence from further questions.
‘Snow’s stopped,’ were the cheering first words with which cousin Joe’s wife greeted Mercy next morning. ‘My Joe reckons the worst’s over, and you might be lucky for a while. He’s good at weather telling, is Joe. How’s your poor sister then? She surely did take your ma’s death hard.’ Mercy and Barnes had decided that the little party should pass for brother and sisters.
‘She slept well, thank you.’ Mercy and Ruth had shared a tiny slip of a room that opened off the kitchen, and Ruth had indeed slept almost too heavily and had waked wild-eyed and silent as ever. Well, for the moment the silence had its advantages.
After a huge breakfast of ham and home-baked bread Barnes and Jed reloaded the sledge while Mercy tried to pay Cousin Joe’s wife.
‘No, no.’ She waved away the money Mercy offered. ‘Friends of Bill Barnes is friends of ours. You keep your money; you’ll need it all before you get to Philadelphia, by what I hear. Some of the innkeepers along that road are proper sharks, I’m told. I wish your brother was older, ma’am, and that’s for sure.’
‘Oh, we’ll manage,’ said Mercy with a confidence she did not altogether feel.
It was a very bad moment when they reached the main road and said good-bye to Barnes, who looked a little better this morning but agreed that he must get home. ‘I do thank you.’ Mercy pressed his hand with her mittened one. ‘For everything. You will watch out for my husband in the spring, won’t you? Explain what happened. He’ll pay you what you and your friends have so kindly lent me.’ She prayed inwardly that Hart would have been lucky at last.
‘Course I’ll look out for him,’ said Barnes. ‘As to paying back, well, we’ll see about that. When he comes. If he comes. It’s been a pleasure to help you, ma’am. I do pray you get safe to Philadelphia.’
‘Thank you, Bill. For everything.’ She was silent for a moment, fighting a lump of tears. ‘It’s too cold to stand.’ She made her tone brisk. ‘Good-bye. God bless you.’
Now that they were on the main road, the going was good, the snow already packed down by other travellers on this well-used road between Boston and Philadelphia. The clouds were high and much lighter. ‘We should make good time today,’ said Jed.
‘Not too far for the horses.’ They were one of Mercy’s many anxieties. She had left a note for Mr. Golding explaining the emergency that had compelled her to borrow his sledge and horses and promising to send them back from Philadelphia, but had to recognise that she was very much on the windy side of the law over the whole affair. How soon would his friends in Farnham let him know what she had done? But that was an anxiety for the future. For the moment: ‘Are we crazy, Jed?’ she asked. ‘Will we get there, do you think?’
‘Sure we’ll get there,’ Jed said stoutly. ‘Now we’re clear away from Boston, there’ll be help when we need it. See’ – he pointed with his whip – ‘smoke there – and there. Houses … people. You don’t see them, cos of the weather. But get in trouble, they’ll come. We hang together, we New Englanders. Mind you’ – he had been thinking about the journey, too – ‘I reckon anytime we find company, for a day, or more, we take it. But we’ll get there, don’t you fret. We’ll get there, in God’s good time.’
He was proved reassuringly right. when the sledge bogged down in a snowdrift later that afternoon, and Mercy and Ruth both got out to try and help shift it. As if by magic, a man and a boy appeared from a nearby wood and helped them free the sledge. When Mercy thanked them, the man urged them to spend the night at his house. ‘My wife won’t forgive me in a hurry if I let female company by. She reckons she’s sick of us men.’
In a curious way, that set the pattern for the journey. There were constant crises, but help always did arrive in the end, and if there were not, in fact, inns every six miles along the road, there were enough so that they could always find somewhere to sleep, usually on the advice of their previous landlord. The innkeepers were often retired militia officers full of war stories, and their charges were usually reasonable enough, running at somewhere round eight dollars a night for the whole party. Mercy had shared the money Hart and Barnes had given her with Jed, and they both of them had it stowed in different places, some in Jed’s pocket, some in the sole of his shoe, some in hers, some in the hem of her skirt, carefully stitched there before they left Farnham. She always took care, before they started out for the day, to have the price for the next night’s lodging ready in a carefully arranged mixture of hard and paper currency, blessing Barnes daily for the amount of hard coinage that he had managed to give her.
Her experience of running the British club and gaming house in Savannah was a godsend to her now, and many a landlord who had begun by planning to fleece the young party ended up with a grudging respect for her hardheaded bargaining. She knew exactly what discount she should get for the proportion of hard money she doled out each day and began to think that with luck and good management she wou
ld be able to eke out their resources to last them at least as far as Philadelphia.
The continuing icy weather was a blessing. Travellers from the South, questioned the night they spent in a crowded Providence inn, assured her that there was no need even to consider the long northern detour that might have been necessary if the Hudson had not been frozen at Fishkill. If it thawed there, she had been told, it might take as much as a week before it was possible to cross the ice-filled river by boat, and a week in Fishkill’s expensive inns, where space was at a premium because it was the main supply depot of General Washington’s army, would have gone far to ruin her.
As it was, they contrived to pass through Fishkill early in the morning and turned south towards West Point, where they crossed on the ice, under the frowning fortresses – Putnam and Wallis and West Point itself – that had been so miraculously built in the last two years. Safely across, they stopped at a little inn on the west bank for beefsteaks and tea and some good advice from a friendly landlord.
‘You must on no account think of going the shortest way to Philadelphia, by Brunswick and Elizabethtown,’ he told Mercy. ‘General Washington don’t let his soldiers go that way, and what makes sense for them most certainly does for you. It’s not just British parties out from New York,’ he explained, ‘though they’re bad enough, but the Cowboys and Skinners is worse. And not much to choose between them, ask me, though the Cowboys do call themselves Tories and the Skinners Patriots. Bandits is what they are, miss, the whole lot of them, and you want to keep clear of them, pretty young things like you and your sister.’
‘Thank you.’ Mercy found the compliment both surprising and heartwarming. She had noticed only the day before that though she still did not speak, Ruth was beginning to look much better as a result of the days spent in cold, invigorating fresh air and the exercise they all got when they walked uphill to spare the horses or pushed the sledge out of a soft patch of snow. They were hungry as hawks by night and slept like logs, despite the cramped quarters where they sometimes had to sleep all together, fully clothed, and Mercy was grateful that they were passing as brother and sister. She called them all Paston, because she thought it would be easier for Ruth, and was glad of it when the friendly landlord went on to warn her of the danger of British raiding parties out from New York.
‘They can cross on the ice, easy as kissing your hand,’ he told her. ‘Harbour’s fruz clear over to Staten Island. Pity General Washington ain’t got more than the rags of an army, or we’d take New York back as easy as winking while the British generals wine and dine their fancy ladies. If only he could surprise them in New York the way he did in Trenton in ‘76, there might be some life in it. Specially now most of their fleet has sailed south.’
‘South?’ It was what she had feared.
‘You hadn’t heard? Word is their General Clinton got clear of Sandy Hook just before the harbour froze in December. Ten warships and I don’t know how many transports. For Charleston, they say. I reckon that figures. The British have found us northerners too tough for them and fancy the South will make easier pickings after the way Savannah fell.’
‘That was a bad day,’ said Mercy. ‘But surely Charleston will never fall so easily. Isn’t General Lincoln there, one of the heroes of Saratoga?’
‘Well,’ said the landlord dubiously. ‘Yes he is. A Massachusetts man, miss, and maybe not all that much of a hero. Anyway if I were you, with that young brother and sister of yours to look out for, I think I’d make plenty of enquiries in Philadelphia before I took the road for Charleston.’
‘First we have to get to Philadelphia,’ said Mercy.
‘Oh, keep to the post road, and a bit of luck, you’ll get there all right. The mails get through, mostly, and the roads are busy enough this time of year, with the snow hard and the sledging easy. The damn British do take the mails from time to time and publish extracts from people’s letters in Rivington’s Gazette, as I’m sure you know, but I doubt if they’d trouble with a young party like yours even if you should be unlucky enough to meet them.’
‘I do hope we don’t,’ said Mercy with feeling. It was partly with this hazard in mind that she had called them all Paston, but suppose by sheer bad luck they should encounter one of the British officers she had duped in Savannah? It did not bear thinking of.
The next few days were anxious ones as they had to avoid Paramus and take a wild, rough road by way of Haverstraw to Morristown, where the American army had built its winter huts and they were hailed with friendly cheers by bands of scarecrow soldiers. Mercy had been warned that Mr. Arnold’s inn at Morristown was expensive and always full as it could hold with officers, so they had made an early start, hoping to press on to Somerset Courthouse, where there was said to be a reasonable inn. It was a relief to get out of the area occupied by General Washington’s army, for she had been anxiously aware of tension building in Ruth as they received the cheerful catcalls and sometimes ribald salutes of the tatterdemalion winter army. They passed through Middlebrook, where Washington had stopped General Howe in 1777, and descended from the heights by way of a valley whose frozen stream leapt down in a series of glittering icefalls. The sun gleamed greyly through cloud for a moment, and Mercy heard Ruth draw a sharp breath. ‘Pretty,’ she said.
‘Beautiful,’ agreed Mercy, delighted at the change in Ruth’s mood. And then: ‘What are you doing, Jed?’ He was fumbling with something he seemed to have concealed under the seat of the sledge.
‘Mr. Barnes gave it me.’ He looked at once awkward and proud as he produced a heavy old-fashioned pistol. ‘He said he’d feel safer if we had it for the debatable ground, and from what I heard last night, I reckon we should be grateful to him.’
‘What did you hear, Jed?’
‘Oh … talk.’ The inn had been a small one, and Mercy and Ruth, the only women travellers, had slept with the landlord’s three buxom daughters, while the men dossed down in the big, warm kitchen which served also as dining and living quarters.
‘What kind of talk?’
‘Cowboys,’ he said grimly. ‘Or Skinners. No one seemed sure which, and it don’t seem it makes much difference. They raided a farm over there a piece.’ He waved a hand vaguely in the direction of New York. ‘Took all the cattle,’ he said. ‘And all the food they had.’
‘Did they’ – she paused – ‘hurt anyone?’
‘I dunno.’ He looked quickly at Ruth.
‘We’d best keep going then.’ She twitched the reins, and the sledge moved smoothly forward. Jed was right, she knew. It made little difference whether the marauding bands that ravaged the farms round New York were Tory Cowboys or Patriot Skinners. All they really wanted was loot. She shivered a little. ‘If we should meet them, don’t fire unless you have to. We’ll give them the money I’ve got out for today, and pray God they believe it’s all we have. But I’m glad you’ve got the pistol.’
‘So’m I,’ said Jed.
The morning passed quietly enough, but as the country grew less mountainous and the road better, Mercy was increasingly aware of the menacing nearness of New York. They were in a district, she knew, where a landowner like Mr. Vanhorn, whose handsome country house they had passed, might entertain the British general Cornwallis for breakfast and the American Lincoln for dinner. As to whose side he was on, that was his secret.
They passed through Monmouth Courthouse, where Hart had been wounded in 1778, and saw the relics of the huts where Washington’s troops had spent the following winter. The light was beginning to fade, and Mercy to look anxiously ahead for signs of the village that surrounded Somerset Courthouse, when she saw a dark band of woods ahead and heard a shot and the sound of shouting.
‘Trouble.’ Jed pulled the horses to a halt. ‘What’s to do?’
She looked about her, her first instinct to hide. But frozen piles of deeply drifted snow would make it an impossibly dangerous business to get the sledge off the road, and even if they did, there was no cover except for the wood ahead of them
. ‘I thing we’d better go on, get into the wood, hope to hide there,’ she said. ‘It looks quite big. There might even be a side track we could take.’
‘I surely hope so.’
As the sledge moved forward again, a horseman emerged from the wood, riding hard, sparks of ice flying up from his horse’s hooves. He was holding his reins left-handed, Mercy saw, and swaying dangerously in the saddle. Whether friend or enemy, he was badly hurt. And now, behind him, she could hear shouting from the wood. How many voices? Not many, she thought.
He had seen them. ‘Help!’ he cried, and then, near enough to see that two of them were girls: ‘No, save yourselves! I’ll hold them as long as I can. I killed their leader, I think. Quick! Back the way you came. It’s your only hope.’ Level with them now, he pulled his horse to a sliding halt and made a fumbling effort to reload the pistol he held in his left hand. ‘Save yourself, madame. There’s no hope for me.’
Now she recognised his slight accent. He was French, one of America’s new allies.
‘The British?’ she asked.
‘No. Some canaille. They ambushed me in the wood. I killed their leader, hoped for a moment the others would run for it. They’re on foot,’ he explained.
‘Then we can all escape them!’ exclaimed Mercy.
‘No. I can ride no further.’
It was too obviously true. Blood was showing now, a dark stain on the right side of his coat.
‘Give me your pistol.’ Mercy had made up her mind. ‘You can’t use it. I can. And will. Jed, turn the sledge across the road. We’ll fire on them from behind it, try to keep them from seeing how few we are. Better that than trying to run for it. Besides, we can’t leave him. Sir’ – she turned to the Frenchman – ‘let me help you dismount. Then they need not see that you are wounded. It will make us seem more of a threat. Quick! They’ll be out of the woods any minute now.’ The sounds of shouting were much nearer. ‘How many?’ she asked as she steadied his difficult descent from the horse.
Wide is the Water Page 7