Last Refuge of Scoundrels

by Paul Lussier

  How had this come about?

  Dimly . . . yes, that was Deborah ordering the throng of Loyalist soldiers clad in green to carry my unconscious body to Philadelphia and directly to Howe.

  Yes, the crinkling sound I remember coming from inside my shirt was the map Washington had passed to Deborah, which she had apparently passed to me, and which Howe had soon found on my person.

  She and Washington wanted Howe to have this map. Why?

  Was it possible that Washington was in the end nothing but a traitor? That this underground Revolution he was running with Deborah was a turncoat operation?

  There it was, after all, the map of Valley Forge, in enemy hands.

  No!

  “Mother wants to see you.” . . . “Arrest that man!” . . . “I’m sorry to have to do this, John.” Even Howe’s “Welcome to the fold, my man.” All of it had to be—had to be—part of a plan.

  I had to believe that sitting here in Howe’s office, taken as a traitor to my country, I was executing a very important errand for my General and The Cause. I had to believe that Deborah and Washington were involved together on a mission important enough to get Alice whipped, me pummeled by Deborah and then praised by Howe.

  But when the talk in the room turned to the subject of how the map I’d brought would make possible the wish of Generals Howe and Clinton to see George Washington kidnapped, I couldn’t help but lose hope. Maybe Deborah was a traitor, after all. Maybe Washington had been duped somehow into handing her a map of Valley Forge, not knowing he was about to be betrayed.

  No, that just didn’t feel right.

  I decided simply to listen for a while.

  There was talk of inviting me as a guest of honor to the “farewell Mischianza” being held later this month for Howe. Apparently this Clinton fellow would soon be taking over for Howe, who would be “retiring” to England. (“Getting the hell out, to tell it right,” Howe cracked.)

  Also there was a rumor that a signed Franco-American treaty was making its way across the Atlantic as we spoke, in response to which George III, panicked to death, was ordering an evacuation of Philadelphia at an unspecified date so that troops could be marshaled to protect what was most important to England: the West Indies routes and New York.

  Clinton, Howe’s successor, was there, in the corner, near the damned dog. He never introduced himself and he squinted a lot.

  I must say that despite my confusion and shock over everything that had happened to me in the past several hours, more than I felt frightened or threatened, I felt ill-prepared. Especially when, on my short but grand military-escorted tour of Philadelphia, I was asked to speak against the Rebel Cause (I begged off, pleading that I was a newish turncoat who needed, for the moment, to remain discreet).

  I never forgot that tour. First of all, the city stank to high heaven of shit. I mean real fecal matter. Everywhere I looked there was evidence of turd. In the statehouse yard. Spilling out of genteel houses through open front doors.

  Eighteen thousand soldiers were occupying Philadelphia, nearly doubling the population of the already overcrowded city and quintupling the number of horses. I could only guess that they’d run out of places to evacuate their bowels and that this, more than any fears of a Franco-American alliance, was why Howe wanted out of the city.

  And, mind you, not a single British officer or aide in the carriage acted as though Philadelphia didn’t smell anything but damned fine. God save them and their king.

  The statehouse, where the Declaration of Independence had been debated and signed, had undergone a conversion into a hospital for prisoners of war (it stank, too, of human carcasses). And the Bunch of Grapes and City Taverns, once the sites of drunken political chitchat, without which there might never have been war, was surrounded by whores and scores of Redcoats playing dice, backgammon, and piquet. I could only imagine what had happened to Hell’s Caves: probably became a diabolical love nest for this Elizabeth Loring and Howe. (By the way, where the hell was she? Oh, there, making out in the opposite seat with Howe. My, my, quite a tongue on that woman.)

  The famous families’ homes of Philadelphia—the Wisters’, the Norrises’, the Drinkers’ and such—all had been taken over by the troops for use as barracks and stables. Evidently the Darraghs’ home was where I was to be housed, because that’s where the carriage dropped me off (Howe was deep into precopulation by now, so I decided not to disturb him with a good-bye).

  “Ta-ta!” the jolly coachman cried, waving me off. “Until tomorrow then.”

  Oh, was that the plan?

  So why wasn’t I surprised when “Lydia Darragh” turned out to be Deborah, a housewife who milled flour when she wasn’t “agenting” for Howe (and double-agenting for Washington)?

  A sharp little home, brick front, two stories. Her husband “Charles”—who, naturally, didn’t exist—was “a sailor, always away at sea” ; and Lydia, as far as the British were concerned, was a Tory lass, a nonpacifist Quaker (nice touch, Deborah), who’d been a native of Philadelphia for years.

  Striped linen dress, starched bonnet, wide apron, even a sprinkling of flour on her hands and stew simmering in the Dutch oven. Deborah had this particular act down cold.

  Of course I wanted to fall to my knees, plead and cajole finally for some explanation to all this madness. But taking my cue from Lydia’s sidewise glance to a handsome, tiny man at the table cutting pretty shapes out of silk cloth and presenting nosegays in various combinations for Deborah’s survey, I got the message: Now was not the right time to speak. Not yet.

  “John,” she chirped matter-of-factly. “Lovely to see you. Stew?”

  “You’re too kind,” I assented. What else could I do?

  “Tea?”

  Of course, tea. She was a Loyalist at the moment.

  As for Captain Major John André, the elf whom Deborah introduced to me as a boarder, he was the man in charge of decorations for “the Mischianza” (that word again). He seemed thoroughly uninterested in my presence, except when Deborah offered me up as someone “particularly good at cuttin’ and pastin’” (a Tory lady, maybe, but she still spoke like a Yankee trollop).

  Believe it or not, I spent three more hours helping Deborah and André design floral bouquets and servants’ costumes for this Mischianza, which turned out to be some sort of grand gala send-off for Howe.

  It was midnight, the thirty-some-odd-year-old André put to bed with his rag doll, before Deborah and I were finally able to huddle before the fire.

  “It ain’t as crazy as it all looks,” she said, taking the lead. She thought again. “Well, maybe it is.”

  I jumped in at last. “I’m still back at discovering Alice! Everything else is a blur! Tell me, tell me that the whipping—oh, I am sick, sick when I think of it now—is part of some . . . Oh, Deborah—and what about Washington? And the knock to my head? And the map? Oh, I’m so perplexed and vexed and confused I don’t know where to begin. Are you a traitor? A friend? Am I on a mission to assist or undermine The Cause? Help!”

  She was staring into the fire, already focused ahead on the business at hand. “Calm yourself, John. Everything’s fine. Alice, too. It was a sacrifice she was only too willing to make. There was simply no other way of getting you to come without risk of detection.”

  “To come to you and Washington?”

  She stopped me. “For the moment, John, please, I beg you, we must stick to the assignment.”

  I tried to hold my tongue. Then: “I must insist—”

  She ignored me. “At Howe’s, did they discuss kidnapping Washington?”

  “Yes, they did!” I answered urgently. “So is all this madness of the past twenty-four hours in the service of thwarting such a plot?”

  “No,” she answered flatly. “In fact, you need to know that Washington wants you to help them with exactly that.”

  “I give up.” I sighed.

  She actually smiled. Then: “Not here,” she warned, leading me to the back.

  She
took me out to the garden. After scaling the wall to make certain the alley was clear, even beating through the rosebushes to be sure no one was hiding in or behind them, she escorted me to a raggedy patch of sod, which, when she lifted it, revealed a hatch door.

  I followed her down into a damp, rocky hole, entirely without light. I couldn’t see her anymore. But I could feel her groping for my hand, which I surrendered.

  The hand. The ferry ride. Ezekiel and the minnows swimming upstream. All of it came flooding back.

  “Deborah . . .”

  “It ain’t so horrible as it looks, John. You ain’t helping kidnap nobody, not really. You’re just getting in there and winning their trust. Getting in on their team, so I can do what I gotta do.”

  “And that is . . . ?”

  “Get this war moving. Finish it up, with your help.”

  “Still thinking small, I see.”

  She shrugged. “Just doing what it is I gotta do.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I hugged her. “I want to say I’m sorry, about food and guns and Bunker and Breed’s and shipping you off and all, and I am—”

  “But you’re mad ’cause all along you were taken for a fool, I know. I wanted, I tried to tell you the only way it was safe for me to do.”

  “When did he first approach you?”

  “You know all this.”

  She’s right, I did. From Cambridge to the whipping to Lydia Darragh, I now understood it all.

  “The only part that worried me was whether you’d be alert enough to keep cool with Howe and the map and all. For that the General and I were counting on you spotting him handing me the map—”

  “And the chase?”

  “To give you credibility as a deserter first with the Loyalists and then with Howe,” she explained.

  “Why me?”

  Silence.

  “The Revolution needs you, John. George needs us to win this thing.”

  “You call him ‘George’?”

  “Someday maybe even to his face. Ain’t quite there yet, though. We made a deal.”

  “Three hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents?” I asked, remembering the odd amount.

  “And Alice. He had to have Alice. As insurance of my loyalty and secrecy.”

  “You sold your own daughter?”

  “No, I freed her, to a bet I knew Washington would never lose. That’s why I couldn’t say anything more at the safe house or Trenton or . . . oh, there were countless times I could have gotten to you, if only you knew.”

  “I get the idea,” I mumbled.

  So all along, Alice was an enlistee and also a spy.

  Yes, I got the idea.

  “And since that’s what she wanted more than anything else in life, it all worked out.”

  “And all along she was fighting right under my nose . . .” I was shocked by my blindness. “So . . . why three hundred thirty-three dollars and thirty-three cents?” I found myself asking.

  “Three, three, three, three, and three adds up to fifteen: the number of times my father raped me.”

  Suddenly there was a knock, vaguely rhythmic and absurdly long. Clearly the “tune,” if it could be called that, disappointed Deborah.

  “She can’t get ‘Yankee Doodle’ right to save her butt. That’s our code. I pray to God she don’t ever come at me wantin’ money to learn to sing and dance, ’cause I’d say ‘Sure, sweetheart,’ when truthfully I’d be dyin’ inside ’cause it’d be like sending my pennies to the moon.”

  “Alice?” I asked, altogether stunned and unable to say more.

  “Sure,” she said matter-of-factly. “Alice with the club fist—but that ain’t no excuse! She’s gonna get that damn song right before she’s welcome in here! So tonight since André’s snoozing and there’s no one around—she’ll wait!”

  This, from the mother of the girl I’d just whipped twenty-four hours before.

  Was there nothing that this woman could not take in stride? Friend, soldier, master spy, doting mum, cranky mum, my love, all in one. A woman who treated the plotting of war as equal to teaching an obdurate daughter—handicap and stinging, bloodied back notwithstanding—how to knock out a melody.

  Of course, she got what she wanted. Eventually Alice tapped out “Yankee Doodle” to Deborah’s liking and was allowed to descend below.

  One look at Alice and I understood how her scars had served her well. As with Washington’s soldiers’ pursuit of me, the whipping had given her all the credibility she needed to cross enemy lines. She was a “deserter” now too. And, after months and months apart, was reunited with her mother, at long last.

  Alice hugged and kissed Deborah like the sun would never rise again. She kissed me too.

  So Alice had been summoned to service as well. So she and I were to work together on whatever it was that was being planned.

  I assumed faith and abandoned suspicion, because here, back with my family, I could.

  “Welcome home,” Deborah said.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Mischianza

  So, things being as crazy as they were, when the British abandoned their plans to kidnap Washington I was inconsolable. Crazier still, my objection to their new, alternate plan to kidnap Congress—wholesale—was based upon my fear that I’d be left out.

  Of course, none of us was thinking or behaving rationally. Howe dropped the plan to kidnap Washington because he lost the map. Per Deborah’s orders, I was to commit myself to anything that would stick me close to Clinton or Howe (who, by the way, in the middle of all this, was mostly holed up with Elizabeth Loring, counting down the days until he’d get to go home).

  The scheme to kidnap Congress was nothing but Clinton’s attempt to keep me around as a conduit for the massive disinformation campaign he was about to mount. For Clinton, his vision unobscured by Loring’s blond curls and big tits, had suspected me of treachery from the start.

  Of course, as I was volunteering to help crazy Philadelphia Loyalist Joseph Galloway scout prospective prison sites for all sixty-five congressional delegates, I had no idea that Clinton was on to me. And certainly Galloway, an ex-congressman himself, a bona fide idiot, was too delighted at the attention he was getting to suspect for a second that the British command recognized full well that he was out of his mind.

  I also have to say, the ridiculousness of the plan notwithstanding, I didn’t mind passing in and out of York (where Congress was still convening), working up plans to lasso that esteemed body into the gargantuan pens Galloway had become convinced we’d have to build, since houses in the country tended to be too small.

  It even took Deborah a while to see that we’d been found out, or at the very least been rendered suspect. Clinton recognized that in distracting me (and by extension, Washington) with go-nowhere, harebrained schemes, and by keeping Deborah reporting on military activity in and around Philadelphia (news of which he knew was surely bound for Valley Forge), he was weaving us into his web.

  Didn’t she make the job look entertaining, though! Combing the countryside as she and Alice would for bits and bobs of information, sewing Alice’s notes inside the button covers of a coat, poking them into a jacket lining or the mouth of a freshly caught fish. Oh, there was invisible ink made of lemons and milk, and a coded system of communication based on various colors, sizes, and densities of different balls of yarn that Deborah, perched on a hill and knitting, would drop off rocks to be found by Valley Forge contacts.

  She sent news of everything: the profusion of construction on the New Jersey side of the river and the redoubts being built at Cooper’s Creek; the horses, some five thousand in number, being ferried back and forth over the Delaware; news of a shipyard destroyed in what turned out to be a purposely set conflagration; and orders issued to the Redcoats to begin collecting supplies, up to twenty days’ worth, to be loaded into wagons and carried across the river whenever the signal arrived.

  Clinton was smart but Deborah, smarter. The construction, the ferries, the tr
ansporting of weapons, horses, and guns across the river—before long it all made sense to her. Clinton had overdone it and tipped his hand. Too much activity, too fast, not amounting to anything.

  In the wake of the recently announced Franco-American alliance, it was common knowledge that Clinton would never be able to hold on to both Philadelphia and New York, and would likely decide in favor of holding the latter. So activities like these, clearly pointing to the evacuation of Philadelphia, weren’t—and for Deborah indeed had never been—the big news. The news would be: when Clinton was going to do it.

  “Wait a minute, this is all a ruse! He’s got me coming and going, looking at ferries and horses and soldiers, can’t you see, ’cause that’s where he wants me lookin’! He’s no fool! Clinton knows Washington needs lead time—what, two, three days?—to move out of Valley Forge and intercept him, and he ain’t about to just give it to us! Forget the guns. Forget nabbing Congress. He’s keeping us from what we need to know!”

  Well, maybe Washington needed a few days, but Deborah’s friends in the countryside didn’t. So if push came to shove and she wound up with less time than was desirable, there were always the Jersey Rebels to blow bridges, fell trees, and block pathways to halt Clinton’s wagon train northeast while Washington gathered his army, his supplies, and his nerve.

  Still, “Absolutely, positively—we gotta know when.”

  Now I realized, that first night in the hole, what Deborah had meant in saying she intended to “finish off this war.” From the beginning, as soon as rumor of the Franco-American alliance hit the street, she clearly had anticipated evacuation (as had Washington) and wanted someone on the inside of British army headquarters—in this case, me—to obtain the all-important news of the actual date of the British evacuation. Washington’s kidnapping had been nothing but the “opening” to get me on the inside.

  “And what if the kidnapping had been pulled off first?” I would later ask.

  “Never,” she answered confidently. “I woulda raced ahead to the Forge and foiled it: ‘Georgie, hide!’”