War

by Edward Cline

  Gage frowned. “Governor Dunmore mentioned the marines, but Mr. Hunt did not. Curious omission.” He paused. “A friend of a friend, you say? I see,” mused Gage. After he again cleared his throat, he continued. “I would dismiss Mr. Hunt’s and Governor Dunmore’s intelligence as shallow nastiness. I myself have never met a Customsman I liked. And I have no feeling for Governor Dunmore, except some grave reservations for his mode of governance. In some quarters he is regarded as a grasping ogre, and the stories I collected while I was in New York tend to confirm that estimation. I am aware of his schemes in the west and have written Lord Dartmouth about them. Perhaps the Crown will call him to account for his actions.”

  The general seemed to realize that he was musing out loud and that he had said more than he had intended to a subordinate. He sighed, and continued. “However, I cannot ignore Lieutenant Manners’s testimony concerning your actions at this plantation. Consequently, I must grant all the intelligence before me here some credence. What have you to say to it, sir?”

  Roger closed his eyes for a brief moment. “Only that I admit the action, sir, and do not regret having taken it.”

  Gage hummed and scrutinized his subordinate for a moment. Roger could not penetrate the opaque expression. Then the general reached into a desk drawer and took out an object, which he placed on top of the damning letters. “Lieutenant Manners asserts that your friend gave you this.”

  Roger gasped. It was the tin gorget that Hugh Kenrick had given him as a parting gift. He remembered removing it when he and Manners had changed into their uniforms in the tavern room, and then forgetting it. The beast! thought Roger. The two-faced, thieving, tattling coward!

  Gage hummed again. “‘A Paladin for Liberty.’ A quaintly dangerous sentiment. A present from your friend, Mr. Kenrick? Lieutenant Manners asserts in his affidavit that you wore this throughout the rest of your journey. Do you deny it?”

  “No, sir,” answered Roger. He added, “I judged it a prudent ruse to stave off over-curiosity about Mr. Manners and myself. Indeed, it saved us a number of scrapes, sir, as we passed through several counties under the government of committees. Intrusive and somewhat belligerent colonials took it for the accoutrement of a colonial officer. When asked, I claimed that we were in the militia of South Carolina and were on a mission to see some rebels in Boston. That seemed to allay their hostility.”

  “I see.” Gage dropped the gorget and reached for a carafe and a glass to pour himself some wine. Silently he gestured to the carafe to Roger, who shook his head. After he took a sip, the general said, “Tell me a little about yourself, sir.”

  With some shyness, Roger recited details of his life. He concluded, “In my father’s last letter to me, which I collected in New York, he assured me that he would arrange for my reelection as the member for Bromhead.”

  “Minden? Artillery? Politics?” Gage had studied the young man while the latter spoke. He sighed, then said, “Now, I know that you are eager to return home, to your wife, to the comforts of England, and to your seat in the Commons. God knows, you have roughed it for the last six months and are deserving of some relief. But you are in a bad patch in this affair. Governor Dunmore and Mr. Hunt, you see, had the foresight to send copies of these letters to the War Office, to Lord North, and to Lord Barrington, as well. Reverend Acland noted that he sent a copy of his letter to me to the Bishop of London.” The general shrugged in unsmiling amusement. “So, if you returned to England now, a court martial would await you there, or at least a demand for your resignation, which would amount to dismissal from the service and a disgrace. Very likely you would need to surrender your seat in the Commons, as well, or even be expelled from that body. If you were asked to resign, I would not recommend that you demand a court martial to exonerate yourself. It would not go well for you.

  “As for me, I would be expected to take some action. If I did not, I would never hear the end of it.” Gage looked stern and strangely compassionate. “I propose that you remain here on my staff for another year, until next October, as an aide or in some other useful capacity. You were an instructor at Woolwich, you say, and so you must have some pedagogical talent. I have among the ranks here some stragglers and regimental orphans who should be trained properly in discipline and fighting. You could perhaps assume command of them. I will write London about this…punishment.”

  Gage noted the crestfallen expression on the officer’s face. “Come next October, you will be free to return to England, carrying a letter from me exonerating you of the charge of sedition and whatever other charges could be laid on you. I have that discretion.” Gage raised his eyebrows. “However, if that is not to your liking and you do not agree to this proposal, I will have no other choice but to call for a court martial. You are an able officer, and that would be unfortunate. It would be a shame to lose you.” The general sat back and waited for the captain to reply.

  After a long moment, Roger forced himself to say, “I accept your proposal, sir.”

  “Good,” replied Gage with some relief. “A wise decision.” He picked up the gorget, studied it once more, then held it out to the captain. “You may have this, but do not wear it in public. It was a gift, and is irrelevant to the matter at hand.” He attempted some levity. “Perhaps when you return to London and take your seat, you could wear it to the debates in the Commons, to better flaunt your…sympathies.”

  Roger rose, took the gorget, and dropped it into one of his tunic pockets. Gage folded his hands over the letters. “That is all, Captain Tallmadge. I will not respond to Governor Dunmore’s and Mr. Hunt’s letters, nor will I communicate this matter to any of the other officers here. You should acquaint yourself with them, in the meantime, to better assess the troops and the situation here. I will send for you when I have made some arrangements. Good day to you, sir.”

  Roger stood up. “Yes, sir. Thank you.” He hesitated for a moment. “Sir, Mr. Manners left my company a day ago, and did not say where he was going. He left not so much as a note. His effects are gone from our room. He was still under my orders. Have you any knowledge of his…whereabouts?”

  A slight smile broke the ice of Gage’s temperate expression. “At his request, I have reassigned him, and sent him to Montreal to report to the officer in charge of the garrison there. He left yesterday aboard a mail packet bound for Quebec Province.” The general chuckled. “After so much time in the tropics, I thought a good dose of a Canadian winter would do the puppy some good.”

  Roger screwed up his face in disbelief. “Did he request that particular assignment, sir?”

  Gage’s smile broadened. “No, Captain. The order came as a surprise to him. I expect he was wanting to be sent to Barbados, or to some other salubrious clime.”

  Roger was secretly pleased that the general had not liked Manners, either. It was just as well that the lieutenant was out of his own reach now. “Yes, sir,” Roger said. “I shall await your orders, sir.” He saluted, turned smartly, and left the general’s office.

  When he returned to the tavern, he took out pen, ink and paper and began to compose urgent letters to his wife, Alice, to his father, and to Hugh Kenrick. Days later, after he had introduced himself to other army officers in Salem, he had practically memorized his response to the rumor, apparently begun by Lieutenant Manners and propagated by members of the general staff who arranged Gage’s interviews and screened correspondence to the general, that he was a traitor and sympathizer with the rebels: “Stuff and nonsense, sir. You will note who was ordered to Canada, and who remains here.”

  He sentenced the tin gorget, wrapped in a length of torn hose, to the bottom of his baggage.

  * * *

  A chill, late October gust swept off the York River and caused them to lean closer to each other. Jack Frake and Etáin were taking what they knew would be one of their last evening strolls this season on the grounds atop the bluff of Morland Hall. In the gathering twilight, faint, shimmering yellow lights were beginning to appear on the opposite b
ank in Gloucester.

  As they moved along the path that paralleled the edge of the bluff, Jack turned to gaze at the lights in the great house. It was too dark for his wife to see the frown in his expression. He said, without warning or preamble: “I do not want you here when it begins. For my own peace of mind, I must know that you are in the safest place possible.”

  “Where?” Etáin did not need to ask what he was talking about. His study desk was strewn with Williamsburg Gazettes and newspapers from other colonies, and correspondence from other chapters of the Sons of Liberty. This afternoon, John Proudlocks, Jock Fraser, and other men had come to meet her husband in the study, where they discussed the resolutions of the August convention in Williamsburg, and news of the debates in the congress in Philadelphia that was beginning to filter south.

  She did not intrude on the meeting, but quietly served the visitors ale and cider and left the room. She had stayed long enough to hear her husband say, “Some counties are not even waiting for a second congress. They have passed resolutions to recruit militia companies and to stock up on powder and ball. We have ample stores of those, but have no effective militia. Mr. Vishonn is the colonel of this county’s militia, but he will not commit himself to calling it up. He is holding out for reconciliation, or a civil answer to the congress’s petition. So, we are on our own, and must make our own arrangements.”

  She left the room then, knowing that the news was dire and that Jack would tell her it. Her husband, John Proudlocks, William Settle, and many of the tenants had helped move the powder, ball, and arms from Morland’s ice cellar to the cellar of the abandoned Otway place shortly after the raid by the Customsmen.

  “In the enemy’s camp,” Jack said without emphasis.

  Etáin furled her brow in confusion.

  He looked down on her face. He could not see it well in the hastening dark, but he could sense the question in it. “With your parents, in Edinburgh. For the duration.” After a few years in Glasgow, her father’s firm, Sutherland and Bain, had reassigned him to Edinburgh to oversee the North Sea and Baltic trade.

  Etáin shook her head. “I wish to be here, with you, when it begins, and for the duration.”

  Jack said, with finality, “No.” He paused. “You are one of the things I shall be fighting for. You, and Morland, and liberty. Morland may perish in the fight. We may even be conquered, and liberty vanquished, for a while. I may need to go into hiding, or I may become a prisoner. But you will remain sacrosanct. I wish to carry with me at least the knowledge that you are apart from it all…from all the bloodshed, and destruction, and cruelty that are sure to come.” He paused. “With you safe from harm, my mind will be clear and my hand free to act.”

  Etáin stopped and said with sudden anger, “Or, you may die somehow, in the fighting, or be hanged or shot, as a prisoner! You are asking me to possibly never see you again, to be apart from you, and to imagine you, beyond my reach, beyond my help, amongst all that bloodshed, destruction and cruelty! Imagination can be worse than the reality, Jack!” She was angry with him, the first time ever, and did not feel the tears in her eyes.

  Jack turned to face her and smiled for the first time this evening. “True. Imagination can be worse. And, yes, I might even die.” He raised a hand to touch her face, and felt the tears, then held her by the shoulders, his expression turning grim with determination. “Or you, if you remained here. You see, if anything happened to you, I am not sure I would want to go on fighting…or living. If Morland were destroyed, it could be rebuilt.” He gripped her shoulders more tightly. “You cannot be replaced.”

  “Nor you, Jack,” whispered Etáin. She moved closer to him and rested her forehead on his chest. She was remembering her governess, Millicent Morley. It was said that she flung herself off the cliff into the sea at Tragedy Point at Falmouth, after Redmagne was hanged and gibbeted. All this time, she was never sure why her governess believed she could not live without Redmagne. For her, it was a subject of occasional and brief wonder, for Jack had always been here, in the great house, or in the fields, or in Williamsburg. The question had seemed superfluous, because he was always somewhere close.

  She trembled now, because she no longer wondered why Millicent Morley had flung herself into the sea.

  He drew her close to him and said into her hair, “I want you here with me, always, Etáin,” said Jack. “And you will be with me, always, when I am alone, doing what must be done…in the coming years.” He paused. “Just as Skelly and Redmagne have always been with me, all these years.” He chuckled softly. “You reminded me of that yourself, Etáin, some years ago, when you thought then there would be war, and I told you I wished they could be here.”

  She nodded in recollection. “And you will be with me, whatever the distance between us,” she said. She realized only after she said it, that she had surrendered to his wish, and would go to Edinburgh.

  “It will be for years, Etáin,” he warned her. “Many years.”

  She did not look up at him. “I will write my parents. When shall I leave?”

  “Early spring,” said Jack.

  Chapter 14: The Annulment

  One evening in December, about a week after the new Parliament had opened, Hugh took Reverdy to Covent Garden to see a restaging of George Colman’s comedy, The Jealous Wife, a loose adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. He did not care for Fielding’s novel, but had selected the play from a number of productions as the most promising. He had heard that Colman’s plays were well done. It was their fourth meeting since Reverdy’s return from Bath. She seemed happy to see him again, but there was an oddly bleak manner in her delight that he could not yet fathom.

  To his surprise, Reverdy eagerly approved of the choice. “They say that Mr. Colman is beginning to eclipse Mr. Garrick in the theater,” she said to him the afternoon he proposed the outing, “and that he is raising the theater to the stature it once enjoyed.” She chuckled in amusement. “Mr. Garrick, it seems, is too busy acting as a messenger between Lord North and that protégé of Lord Rockingham’s, Mr. Edmund Burke. Mr. Burke and Mr. Garrick are members of Dr. Johnson’s club, which is very odd, for I have heard that Dr. Johnson cannot abide Mr. Burke’s politics.”

  “Perhaps not,” Hugh demurred with an invisible shrug. He did not care to discuss Dr. Johnson at the moment. Nor Edmund Burke, the new member for Bristol whom he thought likely to become Lord Chatham’s heir in oratory in the Commons. He had met him briefly in the coffee room of the House the second or third day after the new Parliament opened, and was impressed by his apparent advocacy of the colonial cause. “The theater will revive entirely, once the office of Lord Chamberlain is abolished, and when the theater licensing act is repealed.”

  “Must you always color a subject with politics?”

  “Yes, when the subject has been the object of politics, as the theater has been. You know that politics is not incidental to my interests. And, there is no Lord Chamberlain in America.”

  She was tempted to reply that there was little produced in America that a Lord Chamberlain could censor or approve. Instead, she remarked, “It is unfortunate that Mr. Garrick has not been knighted. Perhaps someday notable artists will receive proper recognition for their contributions to the nation.”

  Hugh said, “He has done well enough without being bestowed the king’s pleasure.”

  A cold drizzle was falling when they emerged from the theater. They waited with others beneath the theater porch for a hackney to take them back to her brother’s house on Berkeley Square, and stood apart from the hubbub and jostling of the crowd. Hugh did not vie with the other theatergoers for a vehicle. He did not seem to be in a hurry.

  Reverdy pulled up the hood of her cape and sighed, “Well, that was a suitable play for us to see.”

  “Why so?”

  “I am a jealous wife.”

  “I did not intend any personal allusions in my choice of this play,” answered Hugh. “I chose it on Mr. Colman’s reputation.” He paused.
“Our marriage cannot be described as a farce, as this play can be.”

  “No, it cannot,” agreed Reverdy. “Perhaps, then…as a sentimental novel?”

  “No. Our…union has been too fierce for mere sentiment.” He looked at her face, which was in partial shadow from the light of a nearby lamppost. “What are you jealous of, Reverdy?”

  She answered almost immediately, “Your other wife, Hugh. Politics.”

  “Do not ask me to choose between you,” he replied. After a moment, he added, “You are an element of a trinity of principal concerns in my world. Politics, or the liberty that may be had from it, is another.”

  “What is the third element?” asked Reverdy.

  “My life,” Hugh answered with a solemnity his wife had not heard in him in a long time. Nor in anyone since her return. The solemnity made her uncomfortable. She resented it. And with a bitterness she could not disguise, she answered, “Yes. Of course, there is always that.”

  The slight did not escape Hugh’s notice. He said nothing for a long moment. Then, at his gesture, a free hackney approached them and stopped. He helped Reverdy into the vehicle, gave the driver the address, and boarded after his wife to take the seat opposite her.

  A while after the hackney jerked forward, Reverdy asked, “Do you not think Mr. Colman stages a worthy play?”

  Hugh shrugged. “The play is worthless, but it was well staged. And, many worthy plays are sadly ill-staged.”

  Reverdy sighed in defeat. “Well, perhaps next week we can come again here, Hugh. The newspaper noted that Mr. Colman is staging The Clandestine Marriage, which I believe he wrote with Mr. Garrick. Perhaps it will be a more appropriate one for us to attend.” When Hugh did not respond to this remark — she sensed that he refused to — Reverdy said, to fill the awkward silence, “Alice must be distraught that Roger has not returned, and afraid that he might be caught up in the troubles in Boston.”

  Alice Tallmadge was inconsolable for several days after receiving Roger’s first letter in mid-November. She had since received a series of letters from her husband, expressing his hope to be able to see her again the next fall. “She is both. Well, at least he was not court-martialed.”