by Becky Akers
“Yes, sir, they’re my brothers. I’m Captain Nathan Hale, with the 19th Continental.”
Knowlton reached over to clasp his hand. “You’re the one captured that supply sloop a few months back. An honor to meet you. You’re cut from the same cloth as your brothers.”
“Thank you, sir. What do you make of that fleet assembling against us in the harbor?”
The colonel shook his head and spoke softly. “We’re in a tight spot. The Howes get any fancy ideas about sailing up either side of this island—and they’d have to be bigger fools than the sots in Parliament not to figure this one out—well, they can land behind us, to the north. Then they’ll sweep down and mop us up as they come. And since they’ll control the waterways with all those ships, there’ll be no running to the Jerseys or Long Island for us, either.” He sighed. “You know they got Hessians aboard?”
Both captains nodded. What treachery, that the king for whose health they had prayed each Sabbath until this last year would hire another country’s army when his own citizens rioted, refusing to slaughter their kin overseas.
Knowlton drank some rum with them before passing a hand over his eyes. “You boys excuse me, will you? I’m feeling a mite feverish. Probably got a touch of the ague going around.” He rose with a nod to each.
Throughout the summer, with thousands of men camped in a few square miles, in hotter weather than most could remember, fevers swept the ranks. Surgeons drained more blood from their patients than British balls would have. Typhus whittled the Continental Army to half its strength, though the Redcoats already outnumbered it and seemed likely to attack each hour.
The waiting ended on a humid morning in August. Despite the heat, the enemy ferried 17,000 troops from Staten Island to Long Island. They landed near Gravesend, a village eight miles south of the American fortifications at Brooklyn Heights. Washington divided his army to answer this threat, sending 9,000 men across the East River and leaving 7,000, most of them sick, in New York, with a few hundred detailed to the Jerseys.
Too many soldiers in Nathan’s company were ill for them to leave York Island. Picking up the slack, Nathan shoveled all day to strengthen breastworks and walked picket by night, despite rain that never quit but did not cool the next day’s heat. Asher Wright knew his friend was driving too hard, but he also knew his place. At last, he could stand it no longer. He suggested Nathan sleep more and spend less time in wet clothes, but his captain charmingly ignored him.
One morning before dawn, Nathan stumbled into their hut, uniform sodden, feet squelching in his boots. When he fell onto his bunk fully dressed, Asher knew something was wrong. He propped himself on his elbow. “Nathan?”
There was no answer.
He climbed out of bed and leaned over his friend, calling to him, shaking him.
But the face remained still, as if sculpted from clay. It was even clay’s dead, gray color. Nathan’s eyes did not so much as flutter. It was hard to say whether he was still breathing—
“Captain, Nathan, wake up!” Asher nearly ripped Nathan’s tunic as he lifted it to lay a hand on his chest. He felt the heartbeat and relaxed, though he frowned at its weakness. Nathan’s skin, too, was clammy and feverish at the same time.
The important thing was to pry him from his wet clothes, bundle him in blankets, spoon warm broth down him. Asher’s mother always cured his brother Ben, prone to chills, this way. But would Nathan pardon such familiarity? A tremor convulsed him, and that decided Asher. He peeled the sleeves from Nathan’s arms and pulled off his boots and hose. But when he stuck his hand under the waistband of his breeches to unbutton the stiffening deerskin, Nathan stirred. His eyes opened, burning clear and bright as Ben’s in the first stages of fever. He ran his tongue around his lips while Asher sat frozen, ashamed to be discovered with his hands down his smallclothes.
“Asher?” He struggled to sit, and Asher pressed him back against the bunk. “What’re you doing? Go find your own breeches, ’cause for certain sure, mine aren’t worth borrowing.” He smiled faintly, closing his eyes and swallowing with effort.
“Your clothes, Nath—Captain. You’re wet to the skin. Just let me get them off you to dry.”
“But I have to—have to—well, there’s something I’m supposed to do. Can’t remember what.” He winced. “Feels like cannonballs rolling around inside my head.”
Asher bent over him gently, as his mother did his brother. “You got the fever, Nathan. You stay here and rest some, till I fetch the surgeon.”
“No! No surgeon.” The blue stare was sharp and clear again and fastened on him intently. Asher started to protest—who had ever heard of not bleeding a man when the fever took him?—but as Nathan repeated, “No surgeon,” he saw how right that was. Ordinary men craved a doctor’s comfort to help them through an illness, but, naturally, Nathan would not. Asher nodded, and Nathan relaxed. Once he fell asleep, Asher reached again for the waistband.
Nathan slept all that day and night. The next morning, he woke delirious, talking and laughing hoarsely. He called for Ally ceaselessly, eyes enormous in his chalky face, growing more insistent each time Asher reminded him they were far, far from home, with a war to fight and Alice safe in Coventry where she belonged.
Asher coaxed him to eat. He spooned beef broth into him, but more dribbled down Nathan’s chin than he swallowed. They tried brandy next, and that went down more easily. Encouraged, Asher concocted gruel with the last of their cornmeal but got no further than the bedside with it. Nathan, raving, knocked his arm into the bowl and spilled it down Asher’s front.
Asher had resolved to honor his friend’s wishes regarding a surgeon. But on the third morning, there was no improvement. Instead, the flame burning Nathan had turned higher, to judge from the red blotches that simmered on either cheek, and his bedding was soaked with sweat. That scared Asher. His brother Ben always recovered after three days. He ran for the surgeon.
That gentleman took one look at Nathan, shivering despite the blankets piled high and August’s heat, and immediately produced his fleam and bowl. “Shoulda been bled long before this. Hold him, son.”
But Nathan, raving again, bucked them so that the doctor could not secure his arm, let alone open a vein in it without risking a hand. Asher went to Captain Hull for help. With Hull bracing Nathan’s ankles, and Asher lying across his chest, the surgeon sliced his arm, and a scarlet stream drained into the basin.
Nathan quieted, lying listless as his blood filled the dish. The surgeon bandaged his wound and handed Asher a packet of powder. “Brew a tea of it morning and evening. Make sure he takes it all. And, son, you come get me, he’s not better in a week. We’ll try blistering next.”
Asher thanked God he had gone for the surgeon that day. The next saw the tremendous Battle of Long Island, with so many wounded and dying that no physician could spare time from his amputations to cure a mundane fever.
While the Redcoats brutally routed the Continentals, Nathan tossed and muttered. Asher nursed him desperately. Every day, men as ill as Nathan died, and Asher beseeched Heaven for his friend’s life. He prayed that Nathan had only caught a bad chill, not the spotted fever. But when he discovered the pink rash spreading on his chest, he bowed his head in his hands and wept. Then he hunted a soldier who could read and write to send word to the Hales. He found a kind, chubby ensign who waited while he choked on his tears and sought words for the impossible. He had never supposed Nathan could sicken and die like lesser men, and he shrank from dealing such sorrow to his family.
Asher regretted his haste the next day when he saw he had worried the Hales for nothing. Nathan’s fever broke during the night, and in the morning, he gazed at Asher with clear but hollowed eyes, asking weakly for news.
“News?” Asher said stupidly. He had forgotten that beyond their hut and his suffering hero lay a world with Redcoats, bayonets, and impending disaster.
Nathan smiled. It was his usual smile, full of joy and excitement and vitality, frail as he was. “Y
es, Asher, news. We throw off the government yet? The Howes turn tail and sail for England?” He paused. “What day’s today?”
Asher thought hard. “It’s Friday, Nath—Captain.”
“So I’ve been sick a week. That makes it, what, August 31? Last I remember, half the army was ordered over to Long Island to hold it against the enemy. What happened? They still over there? We gonna join them?”
“I don’t know. There’s a battle, I think. I’ll go find out.” He started for the door but stopped when Nathan spoke.
“Thanks, Asher, for all your care.”
He nodded matter-of-factly. “I’d do anything for you.”
Nathan closed his eyes, wearied by the conversation, feeble as a newborn. He had once walked miles, hoed corn, chopped wood, taught school. Now even the thought of such things exhausted him. All he wanted was to lie abed for the rest of his life.
Gradually, he realized he was no longer alone. He heard Asher’s voice and swam up through molasses to follow the words.
“—come back later, sir, or I can fetch you when he’s awake.”
“You know where I’m camped, son? It’s important I speak with him soon.”
Nathan opened his eyes with the effort formerly reserved for saddling a horse. “Colonel Knowlton, sir, what news?”
“You’re too sick, Captain, I’ll come back later.”
“No, sir, not at all. Please, tell me, how do things stand on Long Island?”
Knowlton knelt beside him. “Not well, Captain. There was a battle, let’s see, about four days ago now. Enemy overwhelmed us. They swept in behind our defenses and outflanked us and drove the lines back to our fortifications on the heights overlooking Brooklyn. ’Twas the most awful thing you ever saw. I thought, after Bunker’s Hill and all, we stood a chance, even though we’re outnumbered, but....” He blinked, ducking his head. It was several moments before he whispered, “The Hessians, with their bayonets...they were pinning men to the trees, leaving them to die...I fought the French and their savages in the last war, but this was the worst I’ve seen. They took prisoners, too, some of our generals among them.”
“Not General Washington!”
“No, Captain, not General Washington. Nor Putnam neither. But they got General Stirling with almost a thousand troops and Sullivan with about 400. Altogether, we lost a couple of thousand men.”
His voice had sunk so low Nathan was sure he misheard. “A couple of thousand, sir?”
“Against a couple of hundred British.” Knowlton fell silent again. At last, he said, “Thank God ’twas Billy Howe leading them. A Tory was general, and he meant business, he could have finished us. But Howe just sat there after he cornered us in the works. I heard his men were begging him to come after us, and that would have won the thing for them, believe me, but he called them off. His Excellency evacuated us back across the river.”
“Right under their noses?”
“Ferried us across in the dark, night before last. Beats anything I ever heard of. Just about everybody got back here before dawn, but there’s still some troops over there at sunrise. You’re a praying man, aren’t you, Captain?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, then, you’ll agree with me that Almighty Jehovah has His hand over this army. Just at dawn, a fog come up over everything—”
“Fog?” Nathan struggled to sit. “At this time of year?”
“Fog, Captain.” The colonel nodded firmly. “That’s what I mean about the Lord’s hand. I checked around, thought maybe the weather down here’s strange as the folks are, but they tell me no, they don’t get fog in August either, and last time they did, nigh thirty years ago, ’twas a wispy thing, nothing to it. But this one shielding us while we’re crossing was thick as cream, thicker, maybe.”
Nathan lay back on his pillows. He shivered, and not from fever.
Knowlton added softly, “Fog lasted until we got the rest of the troops out of there. Then, Captain, but only then, it lifted clean.”
“Like to have seen Howe’s face once he saw he’d missed you.”
“That’d been a sight, for certain sure. Anyway, I been thinking about how the Redcoats outflanked us. Couldn’t have done it if we’d had some units out there patrolling, sending back word about Howe’s positions and such. When I fought the French in the ’60s, we had rangers that scouted the enemy’s movements. Sometimes meant the difference between defeat and victory. I told His Excellency I’d like to form a corps of rangers, and he’s authorized it. I’m gathering about a hundred of the boys from Connecticut together—fact, I already talked your brothers into it. I need another captain, and I’d like it to be you. We won’t be sticking around the garrison, I can tell you, and we should see some pretty rousing duty. But I think you’re a man likes a bit of action, especially on behalf of liberty.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Knowlton got to his feet. “No need to thank me, Captain. ’Twasn’t a compliment, just an observation. I like what you did with that sloop last spring when you took it right from under their guns. That’s the sort of gumption I want in my Rangers. Well, what do you say?”
Asher, listening from the doorway, never doubted the answer. He slipped out to find the soldier who had penned his letter to Coventry for a second one, this time about Nathan’s recovery and the honor the Colonel had done him.
Knowlton’s Rangers began patrolling immediately, minus one convalescing captain. They reported details of the Redcoats’ activity, which mostly consisted of lounging around the fortifications wrested from the Continentals in Brooklyn Heights. Their lethargy baffled the Americans. They expected such professionals to complete the job so hideously begun.
But Howe whiled away the latter days of summer. His troops polished their bayonets as they spread over Brooklyn Heights, awaiting Christmas for all anyone could tell. Rumors leaped the East River as to why the Redcoats bided their time, each more hair-raising than the last. The Continentals huddled in camp, those who had fought on Long Island silent, their eyes haunted, those who had not also silent, their courage gone. Entire companies of terrified farmers and nervous shopkeepers deserted. The depopulation shocked Nathan, taking his first steps off his sickbed. Quarters were empty and provisions plentiful now that one man remained where three had been before.
Despair stalked the American command as the generals debated their next move in a council of war. They should have abandoned New York, but Congress was adamant that they defend the largest city in America after Philadelphia, and one so strategically situated, too, for controlling access to Hudson’s River. Nevertheless, Washington evacuated their supplies to northern York Island. Nathan moved with the rest of Knowlton’s Rangers to Haarlem, a few miles south of the commissary’s depot, and camped there. He was too weak to do more than supervise while Asher rebuilt their hut at the new site.
Shortly afterwards, Washington summoned Colonel Knowlton to headquarters.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” Knowlton took the chair Washington indicated and waited for his commander to speak. When Washington had requested this meeting, Knowlton supposed it would be an ordinary one, in which he would brief the general on what the Rangers had uncovered and receive orders. Instead, his self-possessed commander paced the room, his usually tidy desk buried beneath papers, inkpots, maps.
“Colonel.” Washington hesitated. “Sir, we’re in dangerous straits.”
“Yes, sir.”
“General Howe launches his troops and the Hessians against us, it’ll be the massacre of Long Island all over again. And launch them he will, sir, it’s only a question of when.”
“Yes, sir.” Knowlton hid his impatience at this recital of the obvious.
Washington halted at his desk, as harrowed as Knowlton had seen him. “That’s why I’ve got to know how many troops he’ll march against us and where, in this campaign and the next.”
Washington hunted through the mess of papers and seized one. Knowlton saw it tremble as he unrolled it. The colonel joined
him at the desk, bending over to study a map.
Washington said, “Congress wants New York held. So General Putnam’s five thousand troops are staying in the city.” He pointed to the southern part of York Island, then swept his finger five miles to the north. “Nine thousand men are here in Haarlem under General Heath.” His finger travelled south again, to an area a third of the way up the island’s eastern shore, between Haarlem and the city. “Nathanael Greene’s five brigades are here, at Kips Bay. But, sir, you can see how thin this leaves us. If Howe attacks anywhere along there, if he brings his whole force to bear at any single point, we’re finished. I have to know where he’s going to attack. Is it going to be the city directly?” He tapped the bottom of York Island. “He’ll get Putnam’s 5000 that way, but not the rest of us, please God. Or mayhap he’ll land farther north, at Morrisania, say, try to cut all of us off from the mainland.”
That would bag the whole army. Were he himself not predicting just such a calamity, Knowlton would have gasped with horror.
Washington ran his left hand up Hudson’s River, his right up the East River. “Some of my generals say he’ll sail troops along both sides of the island, then land and march them toward each other, establish a line and cut off everyone below it. But again, where?” He straightened. “I never was more uneasy than on account of my want of knowledge on this score.”
Washington was almost begging, and Knowlton shifted uncomfortably. Surely he was not suggesting—
“I need a spy, sir.”
The word shocked Knowlton. However indispensable, it was rife with treachery, malevolence, dishonor. He rocked back on his heels as Washington, caught in a nightmare, shook his head.
“I’m not asking you to undertake this, sir,” Washington added quickly. “I was thinking maybe one of your Rangers.”
Knowlton had not formed the Rangers for such ignominy, and it was as much an insult to think he would propose it to them as to assume that he himself would spy. He looked at His Excellency with something close to disgust, though he had previously revered him a jot less than Jehovah Himself.