Colonel Harcourt did not know that his old friend Gifford was one of the prime reasons why the British thought the countryside was so hostile. Our little war of harassment had made a large impression on the enemy high command.
Harcourt held out his hand. “I must get back to the head of the column. I hope you find your boy.”
Jonathan Gifford edged his sleigh to the side of the road and pushed west against the flow of the column. More than once he had to rein in his horses to avoid a man who toppled out of the line of march unconscious from cold and exhaustion. He wondered what he would do if anyone tried to seize his sleigh to transport these casualties. A glance beneath the heavy canvas on the floor would reveal two quarts of brandy, warm blankets, a ham, a thick cut of beef, and other nourishing food. But the officers kept the men under very tight discipline. Dropouts were picked up, slapped in the face, given a gulp of rum, and pushed back into the column.
At the rear came forty or fifty British wagons that forced Jonathan Gifford off the road. The first were full of wounded men who cried out in pain at every rut.
“Dear God,” said Kate, “it’s like watching a procession from hell.”
Finally the road was free and a feeble winter sun broke through scattering clouds. Jonathan Gifford used his whip and soon had the sleigh skimming down the road to Princeton. About noon they rested the horses and heated some tea over an open fire. They gulped it down with bread and butter and were on their way again. Toward four in the afternoon they saw the roof of Nassau Hall looming above the bare branches of the trees and were soon on Nassau Street. Jonathan Gifford hailed a sparely built young man who was hurrying past them in the snow and told him whom he was looking for.
“I have so many sick and wounded I could not begin to remember their names,” said the young man. “My name is Rush, Dr. Rush. I came here as a volunteer and find myself running a hospital.”
“This man had no rank. He was attached to one of the generals, I would think.”
He showed him Putnam’s note.
“Oh yes, I remember him now. I saw him in Philadelphia. Pale as Banquo’s ghost with a wracking cough. I told him he had a fever and should go to bed directly. But he ignored me. Everybody ignores doctors until it’s too late.”
“Where is he?”
“He is in the same house with General Mercer and Captain Fleming. You cannot miss it. It’s a big farmhouse on the Trenton road, just this side of the stone bridge. Most of the fighting took place around the barn and orchard - no one has buried the bodies. I fear this young lady - ”
“Did you say Captain Fleming was among the wounded?” Kate asked.
“Among the dead, more likely, by now. Do you know him? He was the commanding officer of the regiment. Imagine it, at twenty-one. All the other officers sick, wounded, dead.”
“Thank you, Doctor, we’ll find the house.”
In five minutes they were riding across the battlefield. Grisly memories welled up in Jonathan Gifford, the awful slaughter of Ticonderoga, where the dead and dying lay in piles before the walls; the carnage on the Plains of Abraham, where men were torn apart by murderous point-blank fire; the putrefying corpses around Havana. Now they saw men in red coats, others in blue, and others in simple homespun sprawled in odd frozen shapes, in an orchard, in the fields before it, and around the barn and a rail fence beyond it. Two or three dead horses lay in the midst of this human carnage. Burial parties were at work, picking up the dead and lugging them to wagons in the road for transportation to unknown graves.
“I thought I’d seen my last battlefield,” Jonathan Gifford said. “I hope this is it,” Kate said.
They stopped before the farmhouse and sat there for a moment watching the burial parties loading a wagon just ahead of them. “Won’t anyone even say a prayer for them?” Kate asked.
“Their mothers and fathers will,” Jonathan Gifford said.
In the farmhouse, a fat distracted woman met them by the stairs. She was the wife of the owner of the farm. He had fled British-occupied Princeton and was somewhere across the Delaware. Kemble Stapleton? There were so many sick and dying soldiers in the house, she did not know one from another. They would have to look for themselves.
In the first room they saw General Mercer sitting up in the bed, his face and head gashed by three or four awful bayonet wounds. He recognized Jonathan Gifford and smiled faintly. Captain Gifford expressed his sympathy. Mercer brushed it aside with a shake of his head. “We won the day. That is all that matters,” he whispered. He was a dying man.
In the next room, John Fleming lay on blood-soaked sheets, his breath coming in shallow gasps. Kate cried out with grief when she saw him. He looked dazedly up at her. “Is it really you, Miss Stapleton, or am I already in heaven?”
“No, no, it’s Kate,” she ‘cried, kneeling-beside him.
“Stay with him,” Jonathan Gifford said. “I will go look for Kemble.”
“When I heard about you and Mr. Skinner, I gave up all hope that you - ”
“It was what I deserved,” Kate said, tears streaming down her face. “You were right to forget me.”
He shook his head. His breathing was becoming more and more shallow. “I wanted to tell you that day in the garden - how serious I thought it was - principles - I was going to say they were - life and death. I thought you would have laughed at me - now perhaps - ”
“I have changed - I am changing,” Kate said. “I am coming over to - to my country’s side.”
“That gives me great satisfaction - “
He closed his eyes, as if the sight of her made death almost unbearable for him. “I think I would give eternity for a month in Virginia with you, Miss Kate.”
“We may have it yet.”
He shook his head. “Hold my hand. Hold it - please.”
She held his cold hand and watched him die.
Upstairs, Jonathan Gifford was standing beside another bed. Kemble stared up at him with wild fever-haunted eyes. “You aren’t my father. I have no father. Only a two-faced Englishman who says he’s my father.”
A strangling cough convulsed the thin body and all hut obliterated consciousness on the death’s-head face he was little more than a skeleton in ragged filthy clothes. Jonathan Gifford called for Kate. She did not come. He went downstairs and found her kneeling beside John Fleming’s corpse, weeping.
Gently, he drew her to her feet. “Kemble’s upstairs,” he said. “Let’s save him - if we can.”
Kate was appalled by the pallid ranting skeleton she found upstairs. While Jonathan Gifford held Kemble’s arms, she forced brandy down his throat, then wrapped him in clean blankets and helped her father carry him downstairs. Outside, darkness was falling and with it more snow. They laid Kemble on the floor of the sleigh and started home. Before they were an hour on the road, the snow was whirling and roaring in a wild blizzard. Every fifteen minutes or so, they stopped to force brandy on Kemble. But he became more and more listless. His hands and feet were appallingly cold.
“He’s dying,” Kate said.
“Freezing,” Jonathan Gifford said.
Without a word he stripped his bearskin matchcoat from his shoulders, wrapped it around Kemble, and lay down beside him. “I will warm him with my body,” he said. “Pile the blankets on top of us.” Kate obeyed, creating a furry cocoon. She took the reins and urged the weary horses into the storm. All night they stumbled forward. Jonathan Gifford lay there with his arms around his son, listening to him babble deliriously. Often Kemble spoke to his mother.
“Not your fault. Like all Americans - the British. It was his fault - both their faults. Both British - They will pay. They will both pay, Mother.”
Then he would he on some battlefield giving orders, weeping when Americans broke and ran. “My countrymen, my countrymen,” he cried.
Next he was back ten years in a boyhood nightmare. His mother had been incurably superstitious. She frequently lamented that Kemble had been born on Whitsunday. There was an old sayin
g, “Born on Whitsunday, born to kill or be killed.” There was only one way to lay the supposed curse - the child had to undergo a mock funeral, complete with a coffin, at the age of ten. The sensitive, highly imaginative boy had been terrified by the idea and Jonathan Gifford had sternly vetoed it. This had led to his first violent clash with Sarah.
“Don’t put me in the coffin, Mother, I’ll be good,” Kemble whimpered. Then he was in the West Indies with Sarah, talking about breadfruit trees, the dangers of the tropical sun. Warning her. “Mother, be careful.” Weeping again. “You didn’t say goodbye - ”
A cry from Kate. The sleigh came to an abrupt stop. Jonathan Gifford crawled from beneath the blankets and the matchcoat to find a sizable tree had fallen across the road. In the windy darkness, with fingers that refused to obey him, he had to unhitch one of the horses, lash a rope around the tree and drag it off the road. It took a half-hour to finish the job and get the horse back into harness. Mounting the sled to hand the reins to Kate, he found her crumpled on the front seat, asleep. He tried to arouse her but She was too exhausted to respond. He placed her beside Kemble, heaped the matchcoat and blankets around them, and took the reins himself, with nothing but an old broadclbth coat to protect him from the savage wind.
About an hour later they were challenged by a sharp “Halt. Who ‘goes there?” A British light infantry squad surrounded them. They were on the outskirts of New Brunswick. In the darkness they had missed the Perth Amboy road. Jonathan Gifford drove into the British camp and found his old friend Monctieff, who swiftly persuaded one of the British quartermasters to exchange two fresh horses for the exhausted team that had been pulling the sleigh. With this reinforcement, they practically flew the last ten miles to Liberty Tavern.
There, all three travelers were ordered to bed by an appalled Dr. Davie. Jonathan Gifford was on his feet in a day or two. Kate took more than a week to recover from the ordeal. But Kemble was the real patient. Dr. Davie found pleurisy in both lungs. The old Scotsman ordered a strong fire in his room day and night and hot flannel on Kemble’s chest to be changed every half-hour. “The lad must sweat, sweat, sweat,” growled the dour physician. “It’s his only hope, and a damn slim one.”
Bertha, Black Sam’s wife, and Molly McGovern responded magnificently to this challenge. No patient in history ever had more devoted nurses. They abandoned all their duties in Liberty Tavern’s kitchen and elsewhere to the hour-by-hour struggle for Kemble’s life. It lasted almost two months. More than once in the first six weeks he seemed to be strangling. Blue veins stood out in his temples as he gasped for every breath.
In his desperation Dr. Davie summoned all the powers of light and darkness to aid his patient. He appealed to Archaeus, a benevolent demon, supposed by Paracelsus to look after the body’s functions in sleep or delirium. He wrote certain words in Hebrew on a plate, washed them off with wine, added three grains of citron, and forced the mixture down his patient’s throat - an old remedy used by Eastern Jews. He hired boys to thrash the woods and drive away any and all owls because their cries supposedly had deleterious effects on a dying man.
If anything saved Kemble, it was the devoted care of his nurses, and Dr. Davie’s refusal to bleed him. It was a month before the fever subsided and Kemble recognized anyone. “For the next week he was a barely animated corpse, washed, turned, and dressed by the women. He was still too feeble to hold a posset of milk or broth in his hand. Even when he began to breathe freely, he was still listless, engulfed in gloom. Day after day he lay there, saying nothing.
Jonathan Gifford discovered what was wrong. “I suppose you expect me to be grateful to you,” Kemble said.
“For what?”
“For rescuing me. So I can live the rest of my life as a British slave.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Isn’t the war over? The last thing I remember was the fight around the barn at Princeton. The Philadelphia militia broke and ran. I was trying to rally them. I was sure it was the beginning of the end.”
Jonathan Gifford shook his head. “Washington rallied them personally. He won at Princeton and the British were so shaken they abandoned west Jersey. They’re still in New Brunswick and they’ve got fortified camps along the Raritan down to Amboy, which means they’re all around us here. But they don’t control a fifth of the state. Washington is in winter quarters at Morristown ready to contest any move they make.”
Life, animation was suffusing Kemble’s still, gaunt face. “I thought - when I found myself here - “
Jonathan Gifford explained how they had found him at Princeton after the American victory there. “Legally you’re a British prisoner. You and the rest of the sick and wounded were captured by the British when the Americans retreated. The British paroled you in Dr. Rush’s custody, when they retreated.”
“That means I can’t rejoin the army?” Jonathan Gifford nodded. Kemble stared at the ceiling. “You’re glad, aren’t you?”
“Not everyone can be a soldier. Especially in an army that tries to pretend that winter doesn’t exist.”
“But I want to be part - ”
A fit of coughing almost strangled him. His cheeks glowed with unnatural color, sweat glistened on his forehead. Jonathan Gifford helped him sit up in bed so he could get his breath.
“It’s all right,” Kemble croaked. “The Cause needs support here as much as on the battlefield. New Jersey will be the cockpit as long as the war lasts. Perhaps God has sent me home to be a scourge to Tories and trimmers. They stopped the militia from turning out with their lies and threats.”
Jonathan Gifford shook his head. “The militia didn’t turn out because they knew they couldn’t win. This isn’t Massachusetts, Kemble. This British army has twenty thousand men, trained men with cavalry, artillery.”
Kemble glared at his father. “You’re one of them. One of the trimmers. That’s the kind of thinking that’s ruined us.”
“You’ve been almost ruined because your pinchpenny Congress wouldn’t let Washington recruit an army big enough to give the British a decent fight. You don’t win a war with spirit, enthusiasm, Kemble. You win it with trained soldiers, men who know what to do on a battlefield.”
“You may have changed the name of your tavern. But deep down you still want those beloved regulars of yours to win.”
“That’s a damned lie, Kemble. It’s the last thing I want.”
“Then why are you entertaining them for dinner?”
Kemble had heard Kate and Molly talking about Maid Moncrieff’s visit.
“I’m entertaining my personal friends. It doesn’t matter to me what color coat a man wears.”
“It does to me.”
In those harsh words Jonathan Gifford sensed future sorrow. Kemble’s set pale lips and glittering eyes contained neither understanding nor forgiveness. But he suspected that the greatest sufferer from his son’s revolutionary zeal would be Kemble himself.
“FORAGING PARTY COMING from Brunswick.”
Kemble Stapleton stood in the doorway of Liberty Tavern’s taproom. His words emptied the place quicker than the cry of fire. Outside, men leaped into chaises and onto saddles and headed for their farms. With luck they would be able to drive most of their cattle into the woods and hide any silver or jewelry they were still so foolish as to leave around their houses. Corn, wheat, rye, oats were more difficult to hide and it would be impossible to say no sale to a grim-faced British commissary, backed by a regiment of loaded guns. The unavoidable clink of hard money would be consoling if the seller was an independence man and pleasing if he happened to be among the numerous lukewarm.
At the tavern door, Daniel Slocum clapped Kemble on the shoulder and shouted, “Do what you can, lad, I’ve got to see to my cows. They haven’t gotten a piece of beef from me yet.”
As usual Slocum was letting Kemble take the risks, while the Colonel wrote letters to General Washington telling him how vigorously his militiamen were battling the British. Occasionally Slocum jo
ined in the skirmishing, and Kemble insisted he behaved well. But most of the time the Colonel rode off to collect more men or hide his livestock. By the time he was ready to fight, the British foraging party was safely back in Amboy or New Brunswick.
Neither Slocum’s bullying energy nor Kemble’s fervent political rhetoric could turn out enough men to stop a foraging party. This was hardly surprising. As Jonathan Gifford repeatedly pointed out, we were up to our hips in British soldiers. It would have been insanity to turn out the whole militia regiment, even if the men were willing - and it would have taken the whole regiment to turn back a foraging party. The wagons were usually guarded by a regiment, sometimes by two regiments of redcoats.
The most Kemble could do was harass them with a fusillade from some likely spot for an ambush or snipe at their horses as they returned to camp in the hope of cutting off a wagon. West of New Brunswick, where the militia was supported by Washington’s regulars, foragers were often driven hack empty-handed after pitched battles involving as many as a thousand men. That made sense. But there was little point in harassing the British in our district. Jonathan Gifford argued that it only gave the foragers an excuse to loot the countryside, something the British troops had refrained from doing at first. The Germans had, of course, continued to rob everyone with methodical thoroughness.
Kemble vehemently disagreed with his father’s opinion. For him it was not realism, it was a relapse into passivity, even surrender. It was easy for him to take this zealot’s attitude. Thanks to Jonathan Gifford’s excellent connections in the British army, there was no need to worry about what a British foraging party might do to his property. The rest of us were not so fortunate. I will never forget the day that foragers arrived at our farm, after, fighting a brief skirmish with ten or twelve of Kemble’s boys about a mile away. They had two wounded men moaning on the floor of their lead wagon. The Major in command turned out to be none other than William Moncrieff.
The Heart of Liberty Page 24