The woman prattled as she moved about the room.
“I hope the captain doesn’t think we sympathize with the king just because they gave us a king’s officer to heal up,” she said, smiling at the other man. “But we are all God’s creatures, aren’t we, sir?”
The Continental officer smiled and bowed his head.
She turned on Captain Stewart. “And you’re awake, so we ought to come to be friends, don’t you think?”
He wanted to retreat from all that energy.
“Your servant, ma’am.”
She curtsied. “And yours, sir. I’m Betsy Holding. And you?”
“Captain John Julius Stewart, ma’am.” He looked at the other officer. “If you are my guard, sir, I think I can guarantee that I will make no attempt to escape today.”
The other man smiled a little nervously and tossed his hat in his hands. He made a sketchy little bow and Stewart thought that he was probably not very well bred, but then wondered what his own bow had looked like before Jeremy got hold of it. Always Jeremy.
“Captain George Lake, sir. I…” Captain Lake clearly had something very difficult to say. He looked out the window, and Betsy, a woman who had several grown children and was widely known for her sense, bustled around the room one more time and withdrew.
“I can see the gentlemen need to talk,” she said.
Lake pulled up a chair and sat on it, backwards, his chin on the top rung of the ladderback. Stewart noted that he was wearing a very fine hunting sword. French, he thought.
“Can you tell me how I came to be captured?” he asked.
Lake looked at him and there was some sort of hurt in his eyes. Stewart wondered if he had done the man an injury, but it wasn’t that sort of hurt.
“Your horse was hit by a ball. I think it was a roundshot from one of our guns, or perhaps a piece of grape. I saw you go down myself, all in a tumble. Nasty fall.”
Stewart nodded. “I think I can agree to that.”
“I marched right by you. Your men were trying to flank us and the grenadiers were rallying. I didn’t think you looked like much of a threat.”
Stewart nodded, and Lake looked away.
“Your…your man came and stood over you.” Lake leaned forward. His eyes were intense.
Stewart tried to raise a hand.
“I know. He was hit. Somehow, I remember that part. I felt him fall across me.”
“He was shot while he was trying to surrender, sir. I watched it, and I have waited for you to wake up because I wanted to apologize. I can’t think why your man was shot. It turned my stomach. And I know the man who did it—Bludner, who was my own sergeant once.”
Stewart looked at the other man, who seemed very moved. He was young and gawky, with a colonial drawl, and his uniform was not quite the thing, but he had that air of confidence that Stewart always associated with the better type of officers. Stewart noticed these things because he was quite consciously walling himself off from the knowledge that his Jeremy had been shot down in cold blood. He admitted to himself that he had been conscious, had suspected this to be true and simply ignored it. He found himself looking into George Lake’s clear green eyes. They were wide and deep and didn’t seem to hide any secrets at all. He was very young, and for a moment, Stewart felt as old as the hills. Bludner, now that struck a chord. It was a name Sally said both awake and asleep. Stewart tried to overcome his fatigue.
“Bludner? A slave-taker?”
“I think he did some such, yes. I thought to report him to the army.”
Stewart sat back, tired and old.
“Come back another day, sir.” He put his head back on the pillow, and went instantly to sleep.
They moved back into the barracks easily, as if they had never been away, and all the women came out to greet them. Many of the Guides’ women had never gone to Philadelphia because they’d found work in New York or just didn’t want to follow the army, and Caesar thought that perhaps none of them had expected them to be in Philadelphia very long.
Black Lese was there, and Mrs. Peters, coughing and weeping a little and happy to see them back. And there was little Nelly Van Sluyt, who looked half her man’s size, and others—women and children who seemed to outnumber the soldiers five to one or more. Caesar had seen that the men were paid before they marched to the barracks, and now he watched attentively as money was handed over to wives who hadn’t seen much but rations for nearly a year.
He saw Polly standing with Big Lese and talking to her, bobbing her head as she did when addressing someone her elder, the very soul of courtesy. She looked up at him and smiled, a tiny secret smile with a long message attached, and he responded with a great grin that cracked his whole face in two. And then he went back to work, finding barracks space for the new recruits he’d acquired since they marched for the transports a year before and occasionally facing the hard job of throwing an interloper out of a bunk he or she didn’t have a right to. Many black refugees came to the barracks first, or last. And there were holes in the ranks, and losses, and women who knew from letters that their man was dead but had come for the parade in hopes there had been a mistake, and other, harder women who came to get their man’s last pay, or perhaps a replacement man. It was the same at every barracks in New York, and the men had joked about it the night before. Now it didn’t seem so funny, with women and children being turned out because they were no longer attached to the army, and others coming in. They had to find space for new men they had picked up, or move men. Sam the bugler was no longer a child, and needed a bed. Tonny had fallen and a new corporal got his space. On and on. Through it all, Caesar and Fowver worked, each wanting to be elsewhere or to enjoy some of the happier portions, but they had no time and theirs was the only authority high enough to settle the resentments.
When Lieutenant Martin arrived, Caesar left him with two of the stickiest domestic situations and plunged into the kitchen, where Mrs. Peters and Black Lese were measuring out the allowance of pork. It was a pork day, and there would be some pudding—plum duff, by the smell.
“Where’s Polly?” he asked and they both gave him the knowing look that matrons reserve for the young and besotted.
“She waited,” said Lese in her West Indian sing-song.
“But she said that as you were so important,” said Mrs. Peters, “she’d just go about her business.”
They laughed at him when his face fell. “I do like to see you look like a normal young man, an’ not just Mars, the God of War,” said Mrs. Peters. She had a special privilege: although her husband was dead and had never technically been a member of the Black Guides, or even the Provincial Corps of the British Army, she was mysteriously listed on their rolls and continued there. She and Lese laughed at his confusion and weighed another piece of pork.
“Of course,” Mrs. Peters continued, “she did say that if you were decently repentant, she and her father might consider having you to dinner.”
“It’s not my fault!” he said, looking at the two of them. They, if anyone, should understand. Lese Fowver knew every detail of every scrap of a quarrel in the company, and Mrs. Peters had been dealing with barracks issues for four years, and a house full of slaves for most of her life. They both just smiled again.
“She’s in that little church on Queen Street, sewing,” Lese said. “Maybe you should find her.”
Mrs. Peters stopped him. “Did you leave that nice Mr. Martin to deal with the likes of Hester Black?” Hester was the most married, and most voluble, woman in the company. She rarely lacked an issue for her feeling of grievance.
“I did.”
“Shame on you, Julius Caesar. And he wanting to get away and find his Miss Hammond.” But Caesar was gone.
The next day Stewart was able to sit up and eat unaided, and read the Bible, which seemed to be the house’s only book. He thumbed through it idly, looking at stories, and thinking about slavery. He could almost feel his bones knitting.
Mrs. Holding sat with him, now
that he made decent company. She seemed surprised to find that he didn’t have a tail, and that the Bible didn’t burn his hands. She and her husband were dyed-in-the-wool Whigs, “patriots” as they called themselves. He tried not to use the word “rebel” in her house. She had two sons, both in the militia, and two daughters, both married to men of property. She reminded him of every good wife in Edinburgh, and yet she was thoroughly American in the same way that the Miss Hammonds were.
“Do you have a slave, ma’am?” he asked suddenly. Her mouth became firm.
“I don’t hold with it,” she said crossly. “It ain’t right for Christian folk.” He wondered if she had ever allowed her husband an opinion. He liked her.
“Just so,” he said, putting his head back on the pillow.
Polly kissed him and held him close, but before they had time to babble ten words, she stopped him and pushed him away. He thought it was because they were in a church.
“Sally’s in a state,” she said.
He wanted to stay with Polly and she wanted him to stay, but Sally was there between them and he knew he owed it to the woman to find her and talk. He could imagine that Sally was in a state, and he thought he knew why.
He went to find Sally. She wasn’t at Mother Abbott’s anymore—Captain Stewart had seen to that. She had a set of rooms up two flights of stairs over a hat maker’s on Broadway. It was an expensive set of rooms. He was careful going there. Although it was only a few steps up the street from the Moor’s Head, people in New York were touchy about color. He thought of Jeremy, who seemed above such notions and yet completely conversant with them, and he thought of fencing with Jeremy just a few doors along. His eyes filled for a moment and he had to stop. When he was himself again, he went to the narrow door for the upstairs rooms and opened it. A woman in a neat bonnet poked her head out of the door to the shop.
“Are you a friend of our lodger, young man?” she asked.
“I am, ma’am,” he said, making a leg as Jeremy had taught him. She nodded as if it were her due.
“Do your friend a service then, young man. Tell her that I will not have a lodger who makes a nuisance! And that goes doubly for a black one. I don’t care how solid her money is.”
Caesar bowed. He had learned from Jeremy how useful these courtesies were for hiding one’s thoughts.
“And no male visitors in the evening, or she is out. I told my husband that it was a mistake to take your kind in here.”
He bowed again. He felt Jeremy’s voice in his head, and he smiled.
“What kind is that, ma’am?”
She looked at him and shook her head as if it was a matter of little importance.
“What visitor did she have?”
“Now that’s a proper question for a brother to ask of his sister, I’m thinking.” Caesar wasn’t sure what he thought of being Sally’s brother, but he let it pass. “A little white man. I didn’t like his looks, and I’m certain he hit her. What do you think of that, young man?”
He shook his head.
“Hmmf. As I thought. None of us is any better than God made us, I expect. But I want her quiet or gone, do you hear?” She nodded vigorously and shut the door.
Caesar shook his head at his own thoughts as he went up the stairs and knocked.
Sally answered. She was in a shift, and drunk.
“I heard Jeremy’s dead,” she said. He smelt the rum on her. She was naked under the shift, and yet he was quite unmoved by it, because she was so clearly distraught.
“He is,” Caesar said, coming into her room.
“I loved him.” She sat on her bed, a fancy canopy bed from a shop. Her trunks were mostly unpacked on the floor. Her lip was split and she had a bruise on her face and another on her naked shoulder. Caesar nodded easily. He had suspected that Sally was sharing the master and the man, but it hadn’t been his place to say, and Jeremy had never even hinted. Jeremy could be very closed about things.
And Caesar wasn’t too sure he believed Sally, either. She might just love him now for the drama. She was not a simple woman.
“And Captain Stewart?” Caesar asked. He was surprised at himself, because he didn’t care. He didn’t want to know.
“I think I love him a little,” said Sally. “Don’ tell me he’s dead too.”
“No. He’s a prisoner, but Mr. Martin says he’s already on the list to be exchanged. Polly said that he needs shirts and the like, and thought you’d help make him up a package to send through the lines. There’s a cartel going tonight.”
She started at the words through the lines.
“What’s a car-tel?” she asked, a little listlessly.
“A flag of truce,” he said. He was suddenly suspicious of her, as he had been of Lark in the swamp and of Marcus White. “Who hit you, Sally?”
She just shook her head. “A man,” she answered, as if that was all the answer that was needed.
Caesar shook his head in weary disgust. “You loved them, but you went and found a man? And he hit you? What does Polly see in you, or Reverend White?”
She was crying again, drunken tears that could have been real or fake.
“I don’ know, Julius Caesar.”
He looked around the room, at the wreck of her trunks, and smelled the reek of the rum.
“We’re going to clean this room. And you. And we’re going to find the captain some shirts and suchlike, so that he thinks his mistress likes him enough to bother.”
Sally just sat on the bed, shaking with sobs. She was hiding her eyes, and it almost seemed that she was laughing. He shook his head.
“Your landlady wants you gone. How are you going to explain that to him? You want to go back to Mother Abbott’s? Or just lean your back against a building an’ get it done with any sailor trying to make his tide?” He was harsh, and she just sat, her head down, until he finished. Then he went to get Polly. He wanted to slam the door, because it would have made him feel better, but he was afraid the noise would be the last straw for the old woman downstairs.
Stewart got himself up and put on a lovely clean shirt with the embarrassed help of Mrs. Holding. It was one of his own, but someone had rinsed it in lavender and pricked his initials into it since he had sent it north with the shipboard baggage, and he smelled it carefully. It had to be Polly. She could sew, and she took care in matters like this. Sally might dance and talk and drink, but her sewing didn’t run to these fine stitches. He smiled, though, because the perfume on the note had been Sally’s, although the note was in Caesar’s square military hand with another from Simcoe and yet a third from Crawford, all enough to make him dab at his eyes.
And there was a note from Miss McLean. It was a cheerful missive about the turning of summer in the Highlands, the sounds birds made, and her eagerness to be with him. It, too, had a little scent attached. From his bedside, he could read her note and smell her scent, and smell Sally’s, and feel little guilt. Just sorrow, really. He had taken a black mistress because it had seemed less a betrayal than taking a white one. But now, at a distance, he found that he liked Sally fine, and that Jeremy’s death freed him from the guilt of it. It made no sense, but it was fact.
“Your friends, sir?” asked Mrs. Holding. She wanted to get him dressed so that she didn’t have to dally with a man in just breeches and a shirt.
“Just so, ma’am. If you could maneuver that waistcoat round my bandage? Well done. And a stock? Yes, I think they included a buckle.”
She held up his best paste buckle, a magnificent square of dazzling jewels set in silver. He had bought it behind Jeremy’s back. Jeremy thought it vulgar.
“Goodness me, sir. I’ve never seen such a thing. And this is for a man?” She looked at it with something between admiration and horror. “You’ll not see its like in Bergen County!”
“I didn’t think I would,” he said pleasantly. She got the stock buckled.
“And to think you are going to dine with General Washington,” she said, reverentially.
“Yes,” said Stewart, as she tried to fuss with his hair. “Yes, it’s quite an honor for him.”
She struck him gently on the shoulder. “You are quite a card, I find. Quite the young spark.”
He tried not to wince as she tugged at his hair. It made him think of Jeremy, of course, and yet he smiled. Sometimes, thinking of Jeremy made him smile. He opened the letter from Simcoe, and a page from Rivington’s Gazette fell out. He shook it open one-handed and read through the items until he saw the notice that he had been wounded and captured, with a little star beside it, and then it struck him that he had been mentioned in dispatches. He smiled. He flipped it over and saw the quote of the dispatch, a very pretty piece of nonsense that mentioned him in a most heroic light.
Poor Jeremy would have loved this moment, he thought. He put it with Simcoe’s unread letter as he heard Captain Lake ascending the stairs.
Lake put his head round the door and smiled.
“So you are well enough to come?” He seemed very nervous.
Stewart laughed. “A little banged about, but nothing that should worry Mr. Washington.”
“You mustn’t call him that, John.” Lake shook his head. “It makes him that angry.”
Stewart bowed to hide his smile.
“Perhaps you can relieve Mrs. Holding of the odious duties of helping a man to dress by holding that coat, George,” he said easily, and Mrs. Holding chuckled at him.
“He’s been difficult all afternoon, sir,” she said. “I think it the great pity of the world that you have to go and exchange him so that he’ll go back to shooting at you directly.”
Stewart winced as his hand was thrust into the coat and the abused shoulder took the strain.
“I think it will be some time before I’m shooting at Captain Lake.” He smiled at a sudden thought. “Indeed, I wonder if I won’t go home to recover.” Home to Edinburgh, covered in glory. Yes. And then no. He thought of Jeremy, whom he had counted on for humor and for advice in dealing with Miss McLean’s father. But life was going to go on. And he would see Jeremy revenged.
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