by John Jakes
Despite the cold night air, Lumden’s cheeks shone with sweat. Damn. Not good, Philip thought, half-carrying his tangle-footed companion toward the pole.
Two redcoats stood in the snapping glare of torches stuck into the wall of the guard booth. The soldiers brought their muskets up to waist level, bayonets shining. One looked to be no more than fifteen or sixteen. The other was older, a paunchy veteran.
Lumden mumbled and pretended to sag. Philip struggled to prop him up, growling, “Goddamn it, Ned, stand on your pins. I’ll not carry you all the way to Roxbury!”
Lumden did a good imitation of drunken blathering as the heavyset redcoat prodded Philip’s chest lightly with his bayonet.
“No passage to Roxbury till you answer a couple of questions. What be your names?”
Philip dredged up a last name Knox had mentioned once, replied, “George Kemble, sir. I farm land outside Roxbury. My cousin Ned here—Ned Kemble—he’s got a fondness for the town whores. They got him drunk, as usual. I had to come in and fetch him out of one of the deadfalls.”
The soldier peered into Lumden’s face. Lumden affected a moon grin, letting slobber leak over his lower lip. The soldier looked disgusted.
“Have ye papers to prove your identity?”
“Papers?” Philip feigned a witless look, then a queasy smile. “Sir, neither Ned or me can write a line. Farming’s what we know. When we sign, it’s with a mark. Listen, I come into Boston at noon without anybody asking me for papers—”
“Coming in, yes. Going out’s a different story. Bastards like that silver-maker Revere must have papers ’cos they might be on treasonous errands.”
“Oh.” Tense, Philip tried to look merely unhappy.
“Let go of your cousin, then,” said the soldier. “Ye can’t pass without a search.”
Philip reluctantly released his burden. Lumden swayed and clawed at empty air. Philip grabbed him hastily, causing the sergeant to laugh and spit on the muddied road.
“Two of the colony’s finest! Tell me, Kemble—” He laid his musket against the pole, started to poke and probe Philip’s surtout. “—are you lads members of these militia companies we hear about? The fine units they say will take the field against us one day?”
“The Kemble family’s loyal to King George, sir,” Philip said with a toadying smile.
“Ah, yas—”The soldier’s quick hand patted down Philip’s breeches, squeezed his boots. “—every bloody one who comes to the barrier says that. Then we find daggers hid, or cartridges an’ ball. ’Course, it really makes no damn difference. If ye ever do have a mind to fight the King’s regiments, there’s but one thing waiting for you an’ the rest who march up an’ down with them silly sticks on their shoulders—a grave, Kemble. A grave’s waiting for ye. All right. How’s the other one, Arch?”
The younger soldier who had been searching Lumden said, “Nothing on him except the smell of dirt an’ rum.”
Philip seethed at the way the paunchy soldier had spoken with such contempt for the military skills of the colonists. Perhaps if he knew a Henry Knox—!
But he didn’t dare let his temper best him now. The paunchy soldier was reaching for the rope that controlled the pole—
The pole creaked as it rose in the wind. The torches snapped and sparked. Philip swallowed, propped Lumden up again, began to urge him forward:
“Walk, Ned, for Christ’s sake! All full of drink, you weigh a short ton and you’re saggy as a sack of shit besides—”
From the corner of his eye Philip saw the guard booth drop behind. And the pole. Lumden pretended to stumble in the mud. Philip cuffed his ear for effect, cursing even more floridly.
Another step.
Another. The darkness pricked by the lights of Roxbury seemed a reachable haven now.
One more step.
One more—
“Hold up.”
Philip clenched his teeth at the sound of the younger soldier’s voice. The third redcoat had emerged from the booth to lean on the pole as the boy and his paunchy comrade dodged under and hurried after Philip and Lumden.
The younger soldier grabbed Philip’s shoulder roughly. He lost his grip on Lumden. The latter, acting with a vengeance, tumbled face forward into the mud. Harder than he’d expected. A single word burst out explosively—
“Damme!”
We’re done, Philip thought as hands jerked his left arm up. The boy soldier said:
“Look there at what you missed! Noticed it when he was walkin’ away. That’s blood or I ain’t never seen it.”
“So ’tis, Arch,” grumbled the older one, whirling Philip around. Lumden was pushing up from the oozing mud, clambering to his feet. Philip hoped to God that the distraction of the suddenly discovered bloodstain under the arm of his surtout—where he’d gripped the bayonet—might have distracted the soldiers from realizing Lumden had cursed in pure, British English.
“Where’d you come by that, Kemble?” the older one demanded. “Let’s have an explanation—and quick.”
Philip wriggled free, still maintaining his fawning grin.
“Sirs—didn’t I mention already? Ned got mixed up with some real sluts. They damn near clawed me to pieces ’fore I could drag him away. Least I imagine that’s how the blood got there. One of the whores had a little knife. I took it away from her and kind of cut her—by accident, y’know?” He winked. “She bled a storm—”
The heavy soldier acted dubious. “Funny place for the blood to land, though.”
“Admit it is. Just can’t explain it any better. In the fracas I wasn’t too particular about keepin’ clean. I slipped and fell a couple of times. Maybe there was some of her blood on the floor of the crib, I dunno.”
Philip could feel the sweat rivering down the back of his neck. The longer they were detained, the greater the back. He tried one last, huge grin.
“Guarantee you one thing, though. I fixed that whore just fine. There’s one less fluff in Boston to give you a dose of the pox.”
That amused the heavy man. “Well, I’d say that’s a real service to the Crown. I’m a man who likes his fuckin’, but I had that French pox once. It makes you feel like you’re bloody well pissin’ needles.” He stepped back. “Pass on.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Supporting Lumden again, Philip fought the urge to run. He forced himself to walk away from the soldiers slowly, his eyes on the wagon-tracked ground ahead of his boots.
The ground grew darker—darker—
At last the periphery of the torchlight was left behind.
The mournful sounds of wind and rolling water filled the night. Roxbury was ahead—and a longer road beyond. Seventeen miles or so stretched between them and Concord village. The darkness began to seem forbidding, hostile.
And well it might, he thought. In order to help Lumden, he’d left Anne behind, her safety, her very freedom uncertain.
All at once Lumden started to blurt out his thanks. Philip hissed at him to keep silent. The thick, gummy mud pulled at their boots with sucking sounds. The night was growing decidedly colder. The wind slashed out of the Atlantic from the northeast.
Philip hardly noticed the string of in-bound carts creaking toward Boston with loads of fish. When the carts were gone, the road again became as empty and bleak as the future to which the disastrous circumstances on Launder Street had led him. Head down, hands deep in the pockets of his surtout, he kept walking into the enormous dark.
Book Four
The Road From Concord Bridge
CHAPTER I
The Letter
i
A COCK CROWED THE morning. The second morning since the two fugitives had crossed Roxbury Neck. Shivering in the chill, his belly growling, Philip crouched in a roadside ditch and peered at the clapboard farmhouse, its weathervane just turning a sulfurous orange in the January dawn.
Behind the farmhouse stood two dilapidated outbuildings. The larger, a barn, was still indistinct in the shadow cast by
the frost-whitened hillside immediately behind. Inside the barn, horses whickered. A cow lowed.
They had been watching the O’Brian farmstead for almost ten minutes. Philip said:
“Come on, George, for God’s sake! Let’s march up and wake him. I’ll stand behind your explanation.”
The sergeant fingered the mole on his forehead, his habit when in a state of nerves, Philip had observed.
“I wish I’d asked Daisy for some token,” Lumden said. “Something her father would recognize as hers—”
Philip jumped the frozen water in the bottom of the ditch, climbed up the bank to the road.
“Well, I’m not waiting any longer. I’m damn near dead from hunger, and just about frozen stiff from the wind. What’s he going to do, shoot us for redcoats?”
“He might,” said Lumden dourly. “I know for a fact Gage has sent out spies disguised as farmers.” His teeth started chattering again as he followed Philip to the road.
They’d walked most of two nights and half the intervening day. They had traveled north from Brookline through Cambridge, then northwest to the hamlet of Lexington, and five miles more to larger Concord, which appeared to be a substantial village, perhaps as many as a thousand or fifteen hundred souls. It boasted clusters of prosperous-looking homes, a grist mill situated at one end of a pond of some size, a meeting house and a tavern the creaking signboard identified as Wright’s.
On their journey they had gone parallel to the main roads, avoiding the roads themselves, because of the chance that they might be pursued. So the trip had been slow going. Clad only in the fringed leather shirt, Lumden had suffered worst from the winter air.
Passing through Concord village just before first light, they crossed the purling Concord River via a narrow wooden footbridge northwest of town. The land here was different from the flatter country around Lexington. Ridges crested against the skyline. The road Daisy had told them to follow wound between low hills.
They passed the farm she had identified as belonging to someone named Barrett. The next place, poorer than the first, looked bleak in the cold orange glow just touching the eastern ridges.
“George, hurry it up, will you?” Philip grumped now, determined to delay the confrontation no longer.
As they crossed the road and started up the narrow track leading past the house, a figure emerged from the gloom around the barn. Philip and Lumden halted, caught in the open, fully visible in the light brightening the eastern hills.
The figure stood motionless near the barn door, strangely dark, even about the face. A shadow-man. Philip’s heart beat faster. His hand came up, his mouth opened to hail the watcher, let him know they were not thieves—
The figure darted back inside the barn.
Lumden started to ask a worried question. Philip waved him silent, sprinting for the front of the house just in case his fears proved to have foundation.
They did. The shadow-man reappeared, a musket raised to his shoulder.
“Down!” Philip shouted, leaping sideways to tackle Lumden and roll him into the frozen grass as the musket exploded with a puff of smoke.
Philip heard the ball whiz past, strike somewhere out on the road, spent. He shot up a hand, waved.
“Wait! We’re friends. Sent here by Daisy O’Brian—”
Already re-loading, the man by the barn hesitated. Within the house, Philip heard cursing.
The man from the barn loped forward, turning his empty musket and grasping it by the barrel, a club. Philip clambered to his feet slowly and drew in a surprised breath. He saw why the man had blended so completely with the barn shadows.
Black hands gripped the musket’s muzzle. White teeth glinted between black lips. The Negro was middle-aged, plainly dressed in boots, old trousers, a coarse gray farmer’s shirt. But he had a powerful, resilient look about him. Beneath the poll of grizzled hair, his dark eyes were not friendly.
“Honest folks don’t come sneakin’ into farmyards ’fore the light’s up,” he said, passing the corner of the house and coming to within a couple of feet of Philip and his companion. “But horse thieves do. Tell me who you be—and right now.”
The farmhouse door opened. Behind a plume of breath, Philip glimpsed a short, rotund man in a nightshirt that hung to his bare ankles. The man’s eyes and rosy face bore a certain resemblance to Daisy’s.
“What the hell you shooting for, Arthur?” the farmer barked.
“Shooting at a couple very strange birds, Mr. O’Brian,” said the Negro. “Spotted ’em creepin’ across the road.”
“We’re friends—” Philip began.
“You’re a damn liar.” O’Brian scrutinized the pair with cold blue eyes. “I never seen either of you before.”
“Mr. O’Brian, let me explain,” Philip said, taking a single step toward the porch. Arthur tightened his dark hands on the musket muzzle, lifted it back across his right shoulder, ready to strike.
“It’s true you don’t know us. My name is Kent. This is George Lumden—”
“You still haven’t told me anything. Where d’you hail from?”
“Boston. We both know your daughter.”
“You do, eh?” A pause. “Which one?”
“The one in Boston of course.”
“What’s her name?”
“Daisy.”
The farmer pondered. Then: “State your business.”
“Mr. Lumden’s a former soldier of the King’s infantry. I helped him escape two nights ago. Daisy sent us here because—”
Well, why not out with it?
“—because Mr. Lumden and your daughter have plans to marry.”
Philip thought O’Brian was going to faint. “Marry—? You come skulking to the house before the moon’s down, and greet me with the news that this one is my future son-in-law? Blessed Mary! These are mad times—but not that mad.”
Wary of sudden moves because the big Negro was still poised to attack, Philip slowly reached under his surtout. As he did, O’Brian snorted:
“Arthur, I think I’d best dress and load my squirrel gun. We’ll haul these two loonies to Concord and have ’em locked up. Daisy’s intended? Sweet God, d’you take me for a total idiot?” He scowled. “I’d wager the truth is more like this. You’re King’s men. In disguise and hunting military stores!”
“No, sir, that’s wrong,” Philip said. “Will you look at this? I think it’ll help convince you—”
He pulled out the medal on its chain.
O’Brian shook his head. “Wearing a medal from the Mother Church doesn’t prove a damn thing. There are plenty of Irish lobsterbacks, I hear tell.”
“This isn’t a holy medal, Mr. O’Brian. There’s a Liberty Tree on it. Won’t you look?”
For the first time, O’Brian appeared a shade less skeptical.
“You’re one of the Boston band?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Let me see.”
Philip approached the lower step. O’Brian’s thick, gnarled fingers turned the medal, examining both sides before he let go.
“ ’Pears real enough. Could be stolen, though.”
“But it isn’t.”
“He’s telling the truth, Mr. O’Brian,” Lumden said despite his chattering teeth. “I have deserted from the Thirty-third Infantry, in these clothes your daughter found for me.”
“You really mean to say that you and my child—? That the two of you—?”
“Yes, sir. I was assigned to quarters at the house where Daisy works. Mr. Ware’s house. That’s how we met.”
Philip waited tensely while O’Brian continued to study them. Then the farmer’s features seemed to relax a little.
“Well, I’m damned. I’m waked from sound slumber by a musket banging and find two beggarly fellows shivering in my yard—and that’s how nuptials are announced these days? Arthur—”
“Sir?”
“What d’you think?”
“It’s mighty peculiar, sir.”
“It’s
so goddamn peculiar, there must be a kernel o’ truth to it. Let’s fetch ’em inside and hear the whole fancy tale.”
Still keeping a watchful eye on Philip and his companion, the Negro followed them through the front door and the heatless front rooms. In the kitchen, O’Brian stamped barefoot to the hearth and struck a fire under some kindling.
“Now,” he ordered, “sit yourselves down and let me hear it from the beginning. Then I’ll decide whether to march you to Concord and the stocks.”
Philip decided he liked the crusty old man. He certainly couldn’t blame O’Brian for his suspicion. At least they’d gotten out of the cold. He edged his stool a little closer to the crackling blaze and joined O’Brian in staring at Lumden.
“One o’ you start talking!” O’Brian cried.
Turning red, Lumden said, “What my friend Kent has told you is gospel truth, Mr. O’Brian—” He got busy fingering his mole. “I am George Lumden, late of the Thirty-third. While I lived at the home of the lawyer, Mr. Abraham Ware, your daughter and I developed—” He turned redder. “A—a—” He mumbled the rest.
“Louder! Speak up!” O’Brian roared.
“A mutual affection for one another,” Lumden said in a strangled voice. “At the same time, it became clear to me that I had no stomach for this colonial quarrel with fellow Englishmen. I say that to you without shame, sir—I want no part of it! I only desire to marry your daughter, be a good husband and provide for her for the rest of our lives.”
O’Brian’s blue eyes narrowed. “How?”
“Well, sir, in England, my father was a smith. I know something of that trade—”
“God’s wonders! I’d say your head’s cracked—or mine is!—except you really talk like all this blather is the truth.”
“Sir, it is. Daisy and I are—” Scarlet again, Lumden mumbled the rest.
“You expect to marry my child without asking my leave?” O’Brian challenged.
“Indeed not! I—I’m asking it now.”
“Well, I ain’t giving it! Not yet.” The farmer hunched forward. “What’s your faith?”
“Church of England, sir.”