Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

The Revolutionary Record: Ah, an entirely different story. Howe actually considered the successful battle for New York another miserable defeat for him, and it broke him. From this point on, he lost interest in the war, choosing instead, in his despondency, to spend days, nights, weekends—in fact, the remainder of his entire military campaign—obsessing not on his fortunes in war but in bed with his mistress, Elizabeth Loring, the Philadelphia bombshell he dragged around with him and was fucking wherever and whenever he could.

  True, we were cornered in Brooklyn. And as if Howe’s fleet of five hundred ships controlling the East River didn’t make things grim enough, with darkness came surging northeastern winds and a wall of fog thick enough to dash plans for the crossing we might otherwise have chanced. On top of all this, when the wind died and the fog didn’t, there came a silence so deep that the slightest sound, down to and including our tongues panting in fear, brought risk of capture and murderous defeat.

  Silence again.

  Another opening.

  Another miracle, as command seemed to shift, without comment, from General Washington and his officers and aides to some cranky Yankee fishermen, the Marblehead sailors of Massachusetts, able to navigate the fog with ease. One by one, we formed what essentially amounted to a six-hundred-foot human chain to the water, guiding each other by feel (the fog was that dense!) to the rowboats that would, by dawn, ferry every last Continental soldier to yonder shore without so much as the sound of a dipping oar.

  Not a military maneuver—no, it was a high-wire act, a ballet this night that had saved the next day. And to complete the show, the fog lifted just at dawn on Washington, sashed in blue, stepping confidently ashore onto Manhattan. Too late for Howe, across the sound on Long Island, to do anything but watch and swear: “God have mercy and I’ll be damned!”

  As for the subsequent chase through Manhattan, uptown and past Kip’s Bay, the Continentals’ mass retreat was considered by History to be the battle’s worst hour. Yet even in this, there was triumph, signs of a thriving Revolution embedded within the defeat. I could see that now.

  It may well have embarrassed Congress, the scene Washington made that day as the scared militia and Continentals streamed by him heading north to Harlem Heights in retreat, as he slammed his hat to the ground and cried aloud how on earth he was ever going to win this ridiculous war! But the sight of our commander-in-chief, hysterical and out of control, also moved whole hordes of men. When a lowly private helped the hatless, babbling General out of harm’s way, put him back on his horse, and took Washington’s reins into his own hands to guide him away from approaching danger, the Battle of New York was thereby transformed into victory of the most sensible kind. The letters written home by the soldiers featured moments like these, leaving the matter of success or defeat to those who cared about such things.

  The commander-in-chief was tethered to a private, they would write, and that, to them, was as important as the status of our struggle with our king. As were stories of officers stripping themselves of their colorful insignias and taking cover behind privates whose native tunic of homespun provided better camouflage in the landscape dotted with limestone, cattail, and scrub.

  After the Battle of New York, the war entered an even more precipitous downward slide. Enlistments were near to the end of their terms, and Washington was out of options: no money, no food, no arms, no congressional incentives to enhance recruitment and assist reenlistments to keep the army propped up. As far as Congress was concerned, Washington was a failure and his men renegade nuts. By Christmas of that year, 1776, the General was pronouncing the game “pretty near up” unless the troops could somehow be made to stay.

  No word back from Congress. The implication: Make it work or go away.

  Washington made it work.

  To his soldiers he offered no bounty, no land, no fee—no empty promises he knew he couldn’t keep. He simply asked them, please, to remain at his side. Stay past your enlistments, if you would, and we’ll all help each other along.

  Even at the time, the Historical accounts and the Revolutionary record were for once in synchrony about Washington’s brilliant performance. We lauded him for his direct and candid approach to his troops. “Approach” and “performance” be damned: The tremble and quaver to the General’s voice was coming from his core. And every soldier who stepped forward from the line that day to indicate his decision to stay on and fight did it because the man before them was real. Was a revelation.

  Most of the soldiers stayed.

  And so we come to the Battle of Trenton, at Christmas 1776. And the discovery, had I been open to it enough to perceive it, that Deborah was Washington’s top-secret spy.

  The Historical Account: Trenton was an ingenious strike, a strategic blow to Howe, Cornwallis, and that ruthless Prussian mercenary working for the British, Colonel Johann Rall. Washington crossed the Delaware River in the dead of night, standing tall in his longboat, and brought that nasty Hessian to his knees without a single life lost on our side. So Washington was “king” again, for a short time.

  True enough in point of fact.

  Now the Revolutionary version: First of all, if Washington had indeed been standing in that boat he would have tumbled into the icy water and been crushed to death by the jagged floes of ice. So let’s put an end to that fiction right here and now.

  Second, Washington was mostly attracted to the idea of besieging Rall at Trenton not because it was strategically so ingenious, but because lately he’d been learning that “enterprises which appear chimerical often prove successful,” and there was no question that the intended attack on Trenton to this dubious category belonged.

  To snare this “chimera,” he again called upon the peculiar skills of John Glover’s Marbleheaders, the same men who engineered Washington’s “dishonorable exodus” from Brooklyn to Kip’s Bay. He wanted sixty Durham boats bent into the gale-driven sheets of snow and he wanted it done by midnight Christmas Eve. Could Glover do it? Word from a mysterious source was that Rall would be drunk and celebrating the holidays and never in a million years would he be prepared for an attack. Battles simply were not fought at Christmas.

  Says who?

  It was “a terrible night for the soldiers,” Washington later would write, but he would not hear a single man complain.

  Of course not. Because Washington was with them, kicking, pushing, tugging at the ice threatening to sink the little Durhams. Hunkered down, bent over in the cold, with ice forming in his lashes and across his brow and his breath icy wet, he was the best kind of leader, a comrade-in-arms who would let himself be taught how to twist an oar without tipping his craft, and how to jam through ice shards better than twice the boat’s size without causing a whit of damage to the hull. He had learned how to recognize when it was time to put down the military textbooks and go along for the ride . . . that Deborah, as “Honeycutt,” had engineered.

  Oh, how could I have missed it?

  Was I deaf, dumb, and blind?

  How could I have believed that one “John Honeycutt, a Jersey farmer,” captured three nights before Washington ordered up the boats, actually was a Tory “spying on our camp” from the opposite shore? What’s worse, I was the one who interrogated double agent Honeycutt, keeping him under close arrest while Washington was allegedly deciding his fate.

  I should have known: A Tory spy found by the pickets outside our camp—what was there to decide? Hang him, reel him in, and put him on the rack, stretch him to pieces!

  But no, what I took to be Washington’s “common decency,” a collection of halting actions followed by a private one-on-one “trial” at which Washington solely presided, were actually ingenious maneuvers designed to give them both time to hatch this Trenton plan.

  I could see it clear as day now.

  Two days into Honeycutt’s prison sentence, suddenly Washington had scads of information about Rall, his penchant for the bottle and for gambling, possibly even advance knowledge of the particular card game th
at Honeycutt no doubt promised would be keeping Rall occupied as Washington’s forces stealthily approached on the night of Christmas Day.

  After the battle, we found a note under Rall’s card table warning him of Washington’s Yuletide advance in Deborah’s scrawl, warning the Prussian commander to stay in Honeycutt’s trust, fully confident that her message would be blissfully ignored (it had the markings of Deborah).

  A few days before the actual Delaware crossing, Honeycutt escaped. I was chastised for permitting his escape, even accused, for one brief moment, of possibly helping him along. How rich. I was asked how on earth Honeycutt set fire to the tent in which he was being held. Hadn’t he been body-searched for flint, for the potential to create flame? Yes, he had been—but before Washington arrived, a flint secreted in his own pocket.

  Top secret.

  Not even I could know.

  Dating back . . . oh, my Lord, all the way to Cambridge, just days after our arrival.

  I was reminded of that first stare of his, chin in palm, when Washington, even with his terrible vision and at a distance of at least one hundred yards, had somehow determined that “Buttrick” was a woman.

  I was reminded of Washington’s decision later that night to have her dragged kicking and screaming to his headquarters, ostensibly to warn her against conducting herself like a man . . . a meeting she allegedly stormed out of, climbing onto his desk and out of his window . . . with the help of his own tall shoulders, I now had no doubt.

  I was reminded of Washington’s first expense in Cambridge. The next morning he had asked me to pen a note in the amount of $333.33 (a number handpicked by Deborah if ever there was one) for supplies that never materialized.

  Of course they did. As Washington’s first spy.

  The assassination attempt, then?

  Nothing but a ruse, which Deborah, in her story of Bunker Hill, was attempting to convey. Hoping beyond hope that her story of Breed’s would replace mine of Bunker’s and in so doing bring me to an “opening,” to a new way of seeing things, enabling me to share in what really would be happening in the months and years ahead, above and beyond the expressed strategies and affairs of war.

  Why didn’t she just come out and tell me? Possibly she had orders not to, or it was simply too dangerous. But more than likely she did think she was telling me, in her own way.

  In the way of the story.

  Finally I understood her parting words: “Let me help you” . . . and “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

  Not anymore.

  Back at Valley Forge, I didn’t even have to ask where Deborah would be that stinging cold night. I knew. I simply followed Washington on his “nightly walk” through the watershed, down the mountain, and into the nearby forest, there to be transfixed yet again by that radiant, incandescent, mysterious, irrepressible, inexplicable, send-joy-to-my-guts kind of smile.

  I could breathe once more.

  CHAPTER 28

  Mission to Philadelphia

  I remember coming upon Washington and Deborah atop Valley Forge’s Mount Joy, she whispering in his ear, me crying out, “Oh, heavenly woman!” and dashing to enfold her in my arms; and Washington crying, “Arrest that man!”

  Meaning me.

  I remember running through the woods, Washington’s sentries giving chase.

  I remember ducking, along with Deborah, beneath a dark coniferous bough and then being knocked on the head with a log.

  After that, nothing.

  Oh, this business of Revolution never seemed to become less confusing. Just when I thought I had it all figured out . . . oh, how in the world did I get from there to here, and why? And where is here?

  I snuck a peek out the window of the office to which I’d been brought: red brick, gas streetlamps, a wagon going to market with snapping turtles, crab, and pie. I was in Philadelphia. Terribly attractive surroundings, I thought, for someone who must be a prisoner of war.

  I could only assume that the tall, distinguished fat man was talking, since his lips were moving. But my vision was still too blurred and mind too dazed to make out his identity or to discern any of his words.

  I was still thinking back on Washington wanting to arrest me (my memory was slowly coming back), and Deborah crying out: “Run, John, Run!” Then, out from the laurel, Washington’s corps of bodyguards, each of whom I knew firsthand. “Sergeant Morris! Lieutenant Musgrave! It’s Lawrence here!” I called out to two of the six men barreling toward me, bayonets fixed.

  Since it was patently obvious that if I stayed still I’d be meeting the jailer or possibly the Reaper, I did as Deborah bade and fled for my life, with no idea why. And I remember, as I was turning to run, the sight of Washington tucking a parchment into Deborah’s dress and sending her off in my direction.

  Deborah must have taken a shortcut because within minutes she was sprinting ahead of me, jumping directly into my path and beckoning me to follow. With Washington’s guard approaching fast, there was no time for explanations. I followed.

  I distinctly recollect my fears for my life vanishing as I ran, along with thoughts of how on earth I could possibly have put myself in such mortal danger in simply responding to Alice’s call.

  I wanted only to watch Deborah. To observe her tough, muscled legs fording creeks, jumping moss-covered trunks of fallen pine, and her great brown mane riding high and wild behind her on the wind. I wanted only to run behind her until I died, whether that be for two seconds, two minutes, or eighty years.

  It was in the grip of this reverie that I lost my footing on a rock and was sent careening down an icy incline, tumbling over boulders and branches and headfirst into a tree.

  Here my memory dims. Was that Deborah dragging me into a fir-shrouded cavern in time enough to save me from Washington’s soldiers, whom I could hear passing just overhead?

  Was that Deborah who said, “I’m so sorry to have to do this,” before clubbing me from behind, felling me like a tired old tree?

  My God . . . I think it was!

  So who was this fat, tall man, not as distinguished as I’d thought moments ago?

  He sat behind a heavy desk, clawfooted and of mahogany, and tipped back on his chair. He had an olive complexion, slack face, broad nose, and a thick but squeezed, pouty mouth that somehow, in my dazed state, invited comparison to a sphincter.

  Additionally he had the most severe case of the hiccups I’d ever seen.

  I’d laid eyes on him before, that much I knew.

  Keeping my gaze away from his mouth, I fixed upon his forehead and asked the great balls of sweat beading his brow, “Do I know you?”

  I tracked a drop. From forehead to nose bridge to nose tip, directly into his hiccuping mouth.

  “Oops!” I heard myself say.

  I guess I was coming to.

  My muscles ached, my body was bruised, and my ankle probably broken or sprained. My waistcoat and breeches were torn, and I was filthy and caked with dried blood.

  I stared upon the gaudy, red-jacketed aides at the gentleman’s side scratching busily at their quills, recording his words, which here and there I was beginning to make out: “Mount Joy” . . . “impregnable” . . . (hiccup) . . . “there, you see” . . . “not altogether grim” . . . (hiccup) . . . “hmmm, nice!”

  But it was Howe’s pug who finally clued me in to who this gentleman was. Sticking to his corner, staring me down unblinkingly, the nasty little asthmatic canine with the menacing growl clearly remembered both that he hated me and probably even that he’d bit me once before.

  My encounter with that vile little jaw of his dated back to last year, in the hills above Whitemarsh, north of Philadelphia, where we’d retreated in November after it was clear that we’d lost that city, but before we’d decided to winter in nearby Valley Forge.

  We had just routed Howe, not enough to win back Philadelphia but certainly enough to send the British forces flying back to what was now the safe refuge of Philadelphia and to stay parked there for eight more mont
hs.

  Maybe the mistake I made with the pug was naming him Lucifer. I spotted him on the battlefield, after the skirmish at Whitemarsh was done. He was trembling and whimpering near what had been the British line.

  It was all an act to get what he wanted: some food. After that he went at me like Satan after God. “I saved your ridiculous little life, you porcine beast,” I reminded him each time he drew blood. Oh, wasn’t he a terror, running through the encampment nipping at ankles and whole casks of salt cod! And I, a lieutenant colonel, held hostage by an ungrateful little dog—a dog who belonged, we eventually determined, to none other than General Howe.

  “Step on him!”

  “Shoot him!”

  But since neither of those oft-repeated suggestions seemed right, Washington settled the matter, ordering the pug returned, a polite note attached to his collar, to the British commander-in-chief. Out of spite, I thought. Although everyone but myself thought Lucifer had run away from Howe, I thought it more likely the reverse. If we’d only had that little demon on our side, we’d soon have routed the British.

  So here he was again, mangy but loyal Lucifer, staring me down. My thanks for having risked life and limb in toting him all the way back to enemy-occupied Philadelphia’s city limits.

  And yes, before me was Howe himself, the “Duke of Dally,” “Lord Snore of Neverup,” who seemed nothing if not enamored of me and was now thanking me profusely for having “deftly delivered up the goods” to him.

  Oh dear.

  Stretched before Howe was the same parchment I was sure Washington had handed to Deborah, which now I could see was nothing less than a map of Valley Forge, with every embankment, redoubt, and powder house underscored; the configuration of troops arraying the field amply illustrated; the location of the hospital and the respective residences of officers Varnum, Pulaski, Wayne, and Washington outlined. The whole damned camp in plain view of the enemy!

  And I was the man who’d delivered it? Thank God I was smart enough to keep to myself my ignorance of what I’d done! Howe clearly imagined me to be a spy for England.