Hamilton's Battalion

by Courtney Milan

  October 8

  Rachel woke up still tired, but her stomach churned too much to fall back asleep. She checked her watch: four o’clock in the afternoon. Sarah had brought them porridge salted with a few scraps of bacon at seven this morning. Rachel had thought nothing of it at the time, but now a voice in her piped up: a Jew shouldn’t eat bacon.

  It sounded like Mrs. Mendelson. In a flash, old grievances rose fresh and sharp—the time Shearith Israel’s mashgiach inspected their kitchen and found the cheese grater in with the meat dishes, and Mrs. Mendelson loudly blamed it on Rachel, for example. Nathan had rolled his eyes and paid the fine out of his own pocket, and hadn’t understood why that didn’t settle the matter.

  She rolled over. Sarah was asleep, Tench’s face pressed into her arm. Rachel would have to find her own dinner today. Buy it, probably.

  Had they fed Nathan anything since she’d seen him?

  She sat up, felt that her queue was still mostly intact, and, covering her disheveled hair with her hat, went in the direction of the sutler.

  But when she came to the guardhouse, haversack heavy with more or less kosher food, the door to Nathan’s cell stood open and the room was empty.

  Chapter Four

  Rachel’s heart gave a great, frightened bound. “The prisoner—” Had they hanged him in spite of his innocence? Had he demanded his dinner one too many times, and been beaten to death? Had he been taken sick and sent to the hospital? Had—?

  “Oh, the little Jew?” a soldier said. “He made such a pest of himself they finally put him on fatigue duty. I think he’s with the Virginia militia.”

  “Th-thank you, Private,” Rachel stuttered. Outside, she leaned against the wall, heart pounding. What was wrong with her? She had been content—even relieved—never to know what befell Nathan again as long as she lived. She had been annoyed at chance mentions of him in letters to Zvi, amidst synagogue gossip from occupied New York. Now here she was, scared half to death at the mere idea that something might have happened to him.

  She was light-headed from hunger and lack of sleep. That was all.

  The adjutant of the Virginia militia informed her that Nathan was assisting one of their messes in making cartridges, and directed her to their tent.

  Before she even put her hand on the flap, she heard Nathan muttering to himself. “Five and a half across, all right, now five and three-quarters up, two and three-quarters here, connect them, voilà…” The familiarity shocked her for a moment; he always talked to himself when he totted up figures.

  Inside, the mess clustered around a table brought in for this delicate work. Nathan sat at one end measuring cartridge papers—the easiest part of the job—and passed the marked-up paper to a black militiaman on his right, who cut it to size. She was glad to see they hadn’t trusted a prisoner with a knife.

  Nathan’s head was bent over his paper, dark curls falling into his eyes. For careful work with powder, the tent was illuminated by a covered lamp. Its light cut his face below his hat sharply in half: deep shadow and strong light. Unexpectedly, Rachel felt her face crumple.

  She took a deep breath. Yes, he had beautiful curls, yes, his hands were beautiful—fingers curved around his pencil and bent to hold the ruler precisely in place. Yes, his nose was…

  Surely there were other words in the English language besides “beautiful.” She was only too tired and hungry to think of them. “Beautiful” swallowed up all her thoughts and she stood turned to stone, listening to the murmur of Nathan’s voice until one of the militiamen looked up and saw her.

  “What’s to do, Corporal?”

  Distracted, it took her a moment to parse his thick Dutch accent. A moment in which Nathan ripped a fresh page from his book with vindictive glee—oh. He was making cartridge papers out of Pilgrim’s Progress.

  “I’m an acquaintance of Mr. Mendelson’s.”

  Nathan raised his head, his face somehow both tightening and relaxing when he saw her. She bit her lip hard.

  “Ezra,” he said, coolly but without a trace of hesitation or self-consciousness at the false name. She dug her teeth in.

  “Oh, it’s your friend!” His neighbor looked up, smiling. “Glad you came out of it safe. He fretted about you all morning. Paid out a dozen pennies to our drummer, sending him to the hospital for news.”

  Nathan flushed.

  “I brought his dinner.” Rachel was glad her voice at least sounded steady. “I wonder if you might spare him a few minutes.”

  The militiaman looked reluctant. “Well…if you insist, Corporal.”

  Nathan’s mouth twisted wryly. “Quacoe is the first person to be glad of my company in I don’t know how long.”

  Rachel’s hand clenched around the strap of her haversack. She’d chosen their dairy meal carefully, turning the sack inside out and digging her fingers into the corners to rid it of any crumbs of meat. “I can go,” she said flatly. “If you aren’t hungry.”

  He sighed. “Of course I’m hungry. Wait, let me finish this paper.” He drew a last line and passed it to Quacoe. “I’ll be back soon,” he promised, slipping a strip of discarded paper into the book. “You can use the pages up to here. I haven’t read the rest yet.”

  He jostled the whole table when he stood, making a sound of pain as his shackles caught on a table leg. “Sorry,” he said, turning away from her again. “I keep forgetting about these. Did I make you spill your powder? Should I—”

  “I’m hungry, and my shoulder is sore,” Rachel bit out.

  Nathan frowned. “What happened to your shoulder?” Shuffling his way to her, he reached out as if to touch it.

  “I’m carrying our dinner across it,” she snapped.

  “Oh,” he said in relief. “Give it to me, then.”

  She clutched the strap tighter, ducking out of the tent. “You’ll just drop it next time you trip over those things.” She wasn’t his wife anymore, for him to carry her groceries.

  He followed her without argument.

  She headed for the first tree she saw with spreading branches, to come as near as possible to the commandment to eat under a shelter open to the sky during Sukkos. “I didn’t think we’d be able to eat outside, but I—I bought a lemon. It’s the closest I could get to an esrog.”

  He looked surprised and puzzled. “Thank you.”

  It’s not a special favor to you, she wanted to say. Maybe I wanted to celebrate. Just because I eat pork now doesn’t mean I’m not a Jew. But admitting she’d had a wistful impulse to celebrate a holiday with him would actually be worse.

  Strange how much more charitable she felt now she knew he was a Patriot. As if she’d finally won an argument and could be gracious in victory.

  She spread the meal on the dry grass: a quarter loaf of bread, a small hunk of cheese, two dry salted fish, and a bottle of wine half full. Not enough for two people, but all the money she could bring herself to spend at the sutler’s, on top of what she’d already given Sarah for the week’s meals.

  Nathan didn’t take one look and point out that he could have given her money for more, which she appreciated.

  Instead, he picked up the lemon. His face contorted as he obviously tried to figure out how to tell her something she wouldn’t like.

  “What?”

  “I can’t use a lemon,” he said apologetically. “It isn’t an esrog.”

  She gritted her teeth. So much for charity. “We don’t have an esrog.”

  “Right. Or a lulav. It’s better not to fulfill a commandment than to fulfill it incorrectly.”

  Six hundred and thirteen pointless rules, and every one of them precious to him.

  He was fidgeting with the lemon now. His thumb circled the stem end; abruptly, against her will, she thought of him touching her nipple.

  “It was kind of you to think of it,” he said, desperate as ever for her not to be angry with him. “A gut mo’ed.” Happy holiday.

  “A gut mo’ed,” she answered with an ill grace. She hadn’t done
it to be kind. She’d done it because—she didn’t know why. She’d wanted to feel comforted, or uplifted somehow, but she didn’t. When he blessed the wine and passed her the bottle, all she could think about was that his mouth had been on it first, and the water for the ritual handwashing was freezing.

  At home, she’d candied their esrog to serve on the fifteenth of Shevat. Mrs. Mendelson had come into the kitchen and told her to bite the end so she’d finally conceive. And Rachel had done it, consumed with longing for a child she could love the way her mother had loved her.

  Her stomach rolled.

  She was sick with hunger, that was all. Nathan began the blessing for bread, but Rachel couldn’t sit still a moment longer. She tore the hunk of bread, set his half back on the ground, and began shoving hers in her mouth. Her queasiness retreated. Oh, thank God.

  Finishing his blessing, he made an exasperated sound. “That prayer is two lines long! You never could wait for anything.”

  That’s what he’d told her about a baby, too: You’re too impatient. There’s plenty of time. He’d been wrong. There hadn’t been much time at all.

  She’d never be a mother now. Rachel Mendelson was dead. A dead woman couldn’t be given a divorce, so she could never remarry.

  Unless Nathan died, she realized with a painful thump in her chest.

  No. No. That couldn’t happen. She’d made her bed, and she’d lie in it alone gladly. She should just be grateful that esrog hadn’t worked, or she’d still be in Philadelphia, living under Mrs. Mendelson’s thumb. She crammed more bread in her mouth.

  In a few minutes every crumb was gone: bread, cheese, and fish. They passed the bottle back and forth until it was empty.

  They sat there, looking at each other, still hungry enough that Rachel could feel the wine already. Nathan’s eyes flickered down once, twice, his thoughts obviously going in the same direction as hers, and then he snatched up the lemon, digging his thumb into the peel. “Ow, ow, cut on my hand, ow.”

  He handed her half the sections. Rachel hesitated: it would taste better if she skinned each section, but it would fill her belly less. Nothing for it. She jammed half in her mouth and bit down, sourness exploding across her tongue.

  It wasn’t so bad after that first chomp, but she had to chew the skin for an eternity before she could gulp it down without choking. Steeling herself, she popped the other half in her mouth, laughing in spite of herself at the absurdity of it and the look on Nathan’s face as he chewed his own.

  Finally the lemon was gone, leaving behind an aftertaste that was merely unpleasant and lingering. Her eyes met Nathan’s, and all at once she wanted to kiss him more than she’d ever wanted anything in her life. Her body knew in its bones that his mouth would wash this bitter taste away.

  How could a body be so unreasoning, over and over and over again?

  He was thinking the same thing—she read it in his eyes. She could do it. She could lead him a little ways off and kiss him. She could ask him to put his mouth between her legs, and when she was slick and sated she could ask him to fuck her. He wouldn’t refuse.

  Her body was different now, stronger and weaker than it had been the last time he touched it. Her limbs had new muscle and new power, and her ribs showed where they hadn’t before. Her body had ached and blistered and bled, felt the frost at Valley Forge and the stifling heat at Monmouth. She had grown intimate with its mortality, with how easily it could be shot or sliced into.

  She loved her new body, but the one thing it hadn’t felt was pleasure. For years now she’d only come in her sleep, starting awake in a panic that she might have made an unmasculine noise. She wanted Nathan to put his hands on her.

  Nathan wanted to kiss her. But then, he always wanted to kiss her, and even as a new-married man of twenty-three he’d managed to restrain himself at inopportune times. Most of them—he remembered one Purim dinner at a friend’s house, where they’d both fulfilled the commandment to get quite drunk. She’d been uncharacteristically cheerful and affectionate on the walk home, throwing her arms around him and telling him he was handsome, and he’d…

  He’d been afraid it would wear off before they got home, so he’d pulled her behind a stack of barrels and kissed her, nuzzled her neck, and when she giggled and tilted up her head to let him, her hands trustingly on his waist, happiness had swelled in his chest so buoyantly and swiftly that for a moment he’d worried it would crush his lungs.

  The memory didn’t make him happy now. You kept practically begging me to like you, she’d said. Why couldn’t you just give me some breathing room then, when we were living together, if you knew I wanted it?

  He’d never been one to give anyone much breathing room. His mother was fond of saying she’d never had a moment’s peace until he learned to read. He could still remember her telling him, Nossie, let me hear my own thoughts now, when she’d been trying to count stitches or flip a cake out of its pan and he was talking to her.

  Rachel wasn’t wrong about him, not really. He was a coward and he preferred things to be easy and he yammered on and on about nothing and he wanted people to like him far too much. He just wished…he wished she didn’t think those things were so terrible. He wished she’d look at him and feel fond about them.

  He looked at her, reluctantly fond of her stubborn, scowling silence, and in the silence and sunlight he really saw her for the first time since their reunion.

  She was too thin, he realized with a shock, and so was the fabric of her clothes. It was nearly winter! Everyone knew Washington’s army was freezing and half starved, but he’d never thought it was Rachel going hungry.

  The miracle of it struck him afresh, that she was alive, that she’d been living all this time.

  He could see the marks of it in her face: she was firmed and hardened, sure of herself in a way nobody managed at twenty-one. In the fading daylight he could see the dark, downy hairs on her upper lip. She used to carefully pluck them, not wanting to meet his eyes while she did it. He supposed they helped her disguise now.

  He wanted to kiss her, and he wanted to ask her a thousand questions, he wanted to get to know this new Rachel. Now, while he had the chance. Before she left him again.

  But he’d been living all this time too. He wanted to prove to her that he’d grown up as well, and could be quiet if he wanted to.

  More than that—he wanted to give her the breathing room she’d longed for five years ago, when she was young and round-cheeked and didn’t know how to ask for it. Quickly, he said the blessing to conclude the meal. Then he leaned against the cold tree, looked at the sun hanging low in the sky, and pressed his lips together.

  Silence made him itch, even if it wasn’t really silent, broken by unceasing cannon fire.

  But to his surprise, when he left the silence there, she broke it. “When did you stop being a Loyalist?”

  Don’t talk too much. “The British weren’t kind to New York City,” he said finally. That about summed it up. “They didn’t bring peace; they didn’t even bring order as they promised. They kept the city under martial law, so there was no civil justice, but the police court can’t try capital crimes and the courts-martial wouldn’t punish soldiers for anything. The things I witnessed, perpetrated by drunk soldiers who knew they could quite literally get away with murder—” He shuddered. “People who lost their homes in the Fire were living in Canvas-town—it’s just like the name suggests—while Patriots’ empty houses were handed out rent-free to British officers and their personal friends, who hosted Queen’s Birthday galas in them with money meant for prisoner rations.”

  That was definitely talking too much, but—she almost smiled at him. “You sound like a Patriot,” she said, as if it was a happy surprise.

  He looked away, afraid if he gazed too long at the sudden light in her face, he’d be right back at begging her to like him. “They…this is going to sound petty after all that, but they took the bronze plaques from the Shearith Israel cemetery and melted our names and memorie
s down for bullets.”

  He heard her sharp intake of breath. “Whose?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t want to go look. No kin of yours or mine could afford bronze plaques anyway…but I was angry.”

  “How did you find someone to offer your services to?”

  “I didn’t,” he admitted. “Do you remember Haym Salomon?”

  She screwed up her face. “The merchant? I thought the British arrested him in ’76 on suspicion of starting the Great Fire.”

  “They did, but he contrived to get released again. I’d been seeing a lot of him at Shearith Israel after…that winter.”

  Loyalist Jews had eventually persuaded the British not to turn their synagogue into a barracks, but when it reopened, the changes unsettled him—congregants leading prayers with untrained voices from Hazzan Seixas’s bimah, Hessian soldiers helping make up a minyan in a nearly empty building. Without his mother there to nag him, Nathan had begun to avoid services. But after Rachel’s death, he’d needed both the prayers and the fellowship.

  “Mr. Salomon was friendly, and I was pleased by it because he was older and richer than me, and I was lonely and missed my father. But he was sounding me out to replace him, because I handled my firm’s contracts with the British army. He’d made New York too hot to hold him—” He laughed. “Probably not literally?” To his delight, after a pause, Rachel chuckled too. “He asked if I would keep my eye on his wife and baby and pass information to one of his contacts.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “I thought—” He stopped himself from saying, I thought you’d want me to. That wasn’t breathing room. “—it might help. I thought it sounded exciting.”

  “Was it?”

  He grinned at the dubious slant of her eyebrows. “Yes. I’m good at it, believe it or not. Turns out I’m nervous enough already that I can ignore a little more and do quite daring things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Walking into General Clinton’s empty office and searching his desk, and saying when he caught me that I was looking for a pen to annotate my invoice. That sort of thing.”