The Once and Future Spy

by Robert Littell

  “Connecticut.”

  “Where in Connecticut?”

  “Coventry.”

  “Are Connecticut folks still hot for the war?”

  “Lukewarm would be more like it,” Nate told her. “In some townships they were obliged to pick names from a hat to fill the quota of recruits for the summer campaign. Some whose names were picked paid substitutes to take their place. I heard of one man who sent his black slave in his place.”

  “A good victory will change all that,” Molly said confidently. “Do you know about the lobsters landing at Kipp’s Cove on Manhattan Island?” When Nate shook his head in surprise she added, “John Jack came in from the Brookland Heights with the news this afternoon. Seems like the lobsters went across in barges from the New Town Creek on the fifteenth. The Continentals holding the beach cut and ran as soon as the lobsters turned up. They say General Washington was almost taken as he tried to rally his troops.”

  “What happened to General Putnam and the men holding New York City?”

  “They’re supposed to be working their way along the Broad Way toward the Haarlem Heights and Washington’s main body. If the lobsters haven’t already occupied the city, they soon will.”

  Nate allowed as how the military situation looked bleak. Molly agreed. Nate explained why Washington had dispatched him behind the British lines. “He figures he’s got to hold out on the Heights for a good month or two if he’s going to pull his regiments together for a retreat. He sent me to find out if Howe plans to give him the time he needs.”

  Molly stood up. Once again her shadow danced on a wall behind her. “I know the western reaches of the Long Island like the palm of my hand,” she said. “I used to picnic with Isaac at the New Town Creek. We will start off first thing in the morning.”

  “We? Who said anything about you coming along?”

  “The roads are crawling with lobster patrols and Tory roadblocks,” Molly said. “You’ll be less conspicuous if you’re with a woman. I can say I’m taking you back home to whip the cat. The lobsters will wink at each other and whisper snide comments, but the chances are good they’ll let us go on.” Before Nate could disagree she started for the door. “Be careful what you say in front of my great-aunt,” Molly instructed him before she opened it. “She’s a diehard Tory and always mentions Farmer George in her prayers. So do I—I damn his soul to burn in purgatory till the end of time.”

  Molly prepared a glass of warm milk laced with honey for Nate, found him a spare blanket and installed him on a pallet on the dirt floor of the larder. Returning to her bedroom, she pulled a document box out of her dowry trunk, unlocked it with a key she kept hidden in a crack between two floorboards, pushed aside some legal papers (her marriage certificate, the deed to John Jack) and removed the diary she had been keeping in a penny notebook since her marriage. She flipped to the entry recording the death of her husband, Isaac. “Ambufh’d by greef,” she had noted on a page stained by tears. “Life seems not worth living.” She turned to the last blank page, dipped a goose quill into a jar of ink and carefully printed out the following:

  “Septembre the twenty second, 1776. An Agent from General Wafhington by name Nate Hale, a remarcable man with out corruption albeit stil a yuth, sent out to scout ye Enemy lines, ariv’d this night at ye farm in Flatbufh. Being nak’d and at my Toilet I spied him loytring at my window but giveing way to pastions long thout ded I made no outward sign and tarry’d the more to be seen. I afk myfelf if it be sinful & contrary to nacher to defire to be defir’d.” Molly looked up from the diary to reflect on the moral aspects of the problem, then bent her head and wrote: “And I reply: NO!”

  I’m up to Nate and Molly scouting the British dispositions:

  AT FIRST LIGHT NEXT MORNING Molly—still smelling vaguely of camphor—roused Nate, who was sleeping like a baby on the floor of the larder. She handed him a steaming cup of mocha coffee as he stepped into the common room. Through the open front door Nate could see John Jack attaching the traces of a buck cart to a gray mare. Molly drew on a dust cape over her dress and, walking with a limp so slight it seemed more like a hesitation, went outside. Nate hefted his wooden shoe repair kit onto one shoulder, swallowed the last of his mocha and followed her. Down the lane the first cocks were crowing into the morning. Hiking her skirt (knowing Nate he would not have missed the flash of her ankle), Molly climbed nimbly onto the seat of the cart. Nate deposited his kit in the back and took his place alongside her. John Jack handed up the reins to Molly. “See that Great-aunt wears her shawl,” Molly instructed the Negro. “If she complains of swelling in her joints, mix a thimbleful of resin from the earthenware jar with her tea. We’ll be back in two days, God willing.” With a cluck of her tongue and a snap of the reins she set the horse into an easy trot.

  Smoke spiraled up from the chimneys as Nate and Molly made their way through the deserted lanes of the village and headed through Flatbush Pass toward Brookland and the British positions in the marshlands north of the town. They encountered a Tory roadblock on the northern end of the pass, but the two guards who were awake were content to check Nate’s wooden shoe repair kit and hand him a recruiting leaflet, which he read out loud to Molly as they continued on their way.

  “It’s addressed to ‘All Intrepid Able-bodied Heroes,’ “ he told her. “Listen to this garbage. ‘Spirited fellows who are willing to engage will be rewarded at the end of the war, besides their laurels, with fifty acres of land.’ At least on our side most of the men who engage do so out of patriotism.”

  “And what is patriotism?” Molly inquired.

  “Why, nothing more or less than the feeling you have for a country, for its people; nothing more or less than the conviction that their manners distinguish them from their enemy; that they are capable of boundless energy and boundless generosity and boundless justice.”

  “You harbor no uncertainty about this rebellion of ours?”

  “About the rebellion I am not at all in doubt. About what comes afterward I am less sure.”

  Molly asked for instances. Nate gave some. John Adams claimed that by balancing the legislative, executive and judicial branches of a government against one another, the tendency in human nature toward tyranny could be checked, but Nate wasn’t convinced. Nor was this the only problem he foresaw. In victory would the standing army that Washington was so desperate to raise subvert the liberties it was created to protect? Would Washington become king of the Colonies? Would the larger states in an eventual union devour the smaller ones? Would the slave states, by exploiting cheap labor, oblige the antislave states to adopt their ways in order to compete economically?

  “Would you then impose your antislavery point of view on the states that favor slavery as a condition of joining the union?” Molly wanted to know.

  Nate agreed he would if he had his way. “I don’t see how we can complain about being slaves to the British on the one hand, and keep a sixth of our citizens in a state of perpetual slavery to us on the other hand. There is no logic in this, not to mention justice.”

  Molly plucked the whip from its sheath and beat in annoyance at the flank of the mare, which quickened her pace. “You surely consider it inconsistent of me to be a rebel against the King and a slave owner at the same time.”

  “I meant no criticism of you—”

  “Your meaning was clear. John Jack came to me as a part of my widow’s third when my husband was killed. He was valued at a hundred and twenty pounds sterling. I got him and the mare and the buck cart and my dowry trunk and fifty pounds sterling and a fistful of Continentals not worth a plug of tobacco and some pewter plates and my walking wheel and the clothes on my back, and was packed off to play nursemaid to my great-aunt, who had a spare bedroom and needed looking after. Without John Jack I’d have to pay someone to plow and sow and reap, and that would be the end of us.” The mare, running now, was foaming at the corners of her mouth and droplets of foam were spraying back onto Nate and Molly, but she didn’t appear to notice.
“You’re so hot under the collar about Negro rights, but a married woman has less rights than a slave. A slave can sue a white man or a Negro but a married woman doesn’t exist as far as the courts are concerned. She can’t vote or sue or put her name to a contract. She can’t even draw up a will. A slave can keep what wages he earns, some have even saved up enough to buy their freedom, but a wife’s wages belong by law to her husband.” Molly became aware of the horse foaming and drew back on the reins, slowing her to a walk. She looked sideways at Nate and said bitterly, “When have you ever heard of a wife saving up enough to buy her freedom?”

  “Was marriage so bad to you then?” Nate asked.

  “Isaac was a gentle man and good at lovemaking and I dearly miss his company,” Molly said. She added passionately, “But that doesn’t change one thing I have said about a married woman being more of a slave than a slave.”

  Molly fell silent and Nate decided it was the better part of wisdom to let the issue rest. A company of Royal Artillerymen in blue and red tunics overtook the buck cart, coming from Graves End. Nate counted fourteen six-pounders and five wagons covered with tarred canvas and probably filled with powder and shot. The artillerymen astride the horses pulling the cannon bantered with Molly as they rode past. “What a lass like you needs is a King’s man,” shouted a trooper with a gray beard.

  “Do you think you can get it up, what with you being this far from home?” Molly shouted back gaily.

  “If I can get it out I can get it up,” the trooper retorted to the amusement of his comrades.

  “Watch you don’t anger them,” Nate whispered, but by then Molly was laughing at every remark and giving back as good as she got. She pulled up to rest the mare and let the dust raised by the artillerymen settle, and started off again. The cluster of houses that formed Brookland came into view as they climbed the heights and followed its crest. At the edge of town a half dozen Light Dragoons with dirty red plumes jutting from their brass helmets stopped the buck cart and questioned them. Molly explained that she had been visiting a great-aunt in Flatbush and was returning home to Brookland with a shoe repairman she had picked up on the road. The lobsters exchanged knowing looks, checked Nate’s wooden kit and let them pass.

  They stopped for wedges of meat-and-vegetable pie and tankards of cider at The Sign of the Black Kettle on the waterfront of Brookland. The main room of the inn was crowded with merchants and traders and they had to squeeze in on a bench across from two coopers who were nibbling raw garlic cloves with their meal. Farther down the table half a dozen young officers from a Tory regiment were drinking Madeira. One of them could be overheard boasting about Washington’s days being numbered. A Tory with a sickle-shaped whisker on each cheek asked how far it was from Frog’s Neck to King’s Bridge. Eight, maybe nine miles as the crow flies, someone guessed. The Tory with the whiskers said something that Nate didn’t catch. The others laughed boisterously. Nate and Molly avoided each other’s eyes.

  After lunch they walked the length of the waterfront, examining the cargo ships and men-of-war tied up or anchored out waiting their turn for a pier. Nate noted the names of the men-of-war and counted their guns, and ducked behind a toolshed to scribble in his notebook Latin words, which, when sounded out, read:

  HMS Roebuck, forty guns

  HMS Orpheus, thirty-two guns

  HMS Carysfort twenty-eight guns

  HMS Rose, thirty-two guns

  HMS Phoenix, forty guns

  “Did you notice anything curious about the British warships?” Nate asked Molly as they climbed back into the buck cart.

  “Only the Union Jack, the sight of which brings bile to my throat,” she replied.

  “Ships of the line have four to six longboats each. But there were none in the davits, and none alongside, and none at the piers.”

  “Maybe they are all off to Manhattan, provisioning.”

  “Maybe,” Nate said thoughtfully.

  “Which implies ‘Maybe not,’ “ Molly noted.

  The highway outside of Brookland was crawling with lobsters going in both directions. Molly talked her way past two roadblocks, one manned by Tories, one by Northumberland Fusiliers in bearskin hats, and put the mare into a fast trot as they headed up the highway that skirted the New Town Creek and led to the New Town and, beyond, the village of Hushing. Off to the left a gently rolling series of slopes hid the low-lying marshes that surrounded the creek. “It’s from there the lobsters launched their boats against Kipp’s Cove,” Molly explained, waving a hand.

  “We ought to take a gander at it,” Nate suggested.

  Molly drove the buck cart off the highway and hid it and the mare behind a thick tangle of wild blueberry bushes. Leaving her dust cape in the cart, popping blueberries into her mouth, she trailed after Nate across the fields toward a rise. As he neared the top he crouched low and crawled the last few yards. Molly, her lips dyed blue, crawled up beside him and together they looked out through the tall grass at the New Town Creek, with the East River and Manhattan Island beyond. The afternoon was stifling hot and filled with the dry ticking of crickets. Kipp’s farmhouse and, farther north, Turtle Bay and the Beekman mansion overlooking it were all visible across the river. The creek itself, angling off toward Nate’s right, was crammed with longboats moored in rows a dozen abreast—Nate counted nine rows—and buzzing with activity. Scores of tents had been set up parallel to the creek line, and hundreds of men could be seen stacking kegs of powder and cartons of shot on the shore near the boats, cleaning cannon or muskets, caulking boats that had been beached and turned upside down. Beyond the tents, in a field, a sergeant major was putting half a hundred highlanders in kilts through their paces; on a shouted order that Nate could just hear, the men knelt and made as if to fire, then gave way to a second rank that knelt and made as if to fire in turn. Nate whistled under his breath and put a palm on Molly’s back, which was soaked through with sweat. “The ones in blue coats are Hessian Grenadiers, the ones in green, Jaegers. They say the Jaegers were recruited from hunters and game wardens in Germany and are all sharpshooters. The yellow uniforms over there must be the 29th Worcestershires; we took one of them prisoner outside Boston. The purple are the 59th East Lancashires. See the white leggings and scarlet coats? Those must be the famous 5th and 52nd Grenadiers—the ones Howe led against my Colonel Knowlton at the rail fence beneath Breed’s Hill. If I had to guess, I’d say there were three thousand men out there if there was one.”

  Molly asked, “How many men can one of those longboats hold?”

  Nate was recording what he saw, in Latin, in his notebook. “I should think fifty or sixty.”

  “Nine rows of boats with twelve to a row makes a hundred eight boats, plus the three being caulked makes a hundred and eleven, multiplied by, say, fifty, makes”—she scratched some numbers in the dirt with a fingertip—”Five thousand five hundred fifty.” Staring out at the British soldiers, Molly’s eyes narrowed. “When I see lobsters the Irish in me smothers the woman in me,” she said in a bitter undertone.

  “How old were you when you came across to the Colonies?”

  “I was going on seven.”

  “Do you remember Ireland at all?”

  “I remember the humiliation of living in an occupied country. I remember the violence of the occupiers—the people baitings, the bear baitings, the public hangings. Once the lobsters strung up a fourteen-year-old girl for stealing a lace handkerchief. Till the day I die I’ll hear her screams as they carted her through the streets with a sign around her neck. I remember the sound of the sea and the swell of the sea that took me away from all that, or so I thought. And here they are again. You and your like fight because you are patriots. I fight because I’m doing what the Irish anywhere in the world get the most pleasure out of—killing lobsters.”

  Nate finished scribbling notes to himself in the notebook. He remembered the Tory officer at the Black Kettle mentioning King’s Bridge and Frog’s Neck. “Where exactly is Frog’s Neck?” he asked M
olly.

  “If you follow the East River up a few miles past Hell Gate and the Two Brothers, where the river empties into the sound there’s a spit of land sticking out of the north shore that looks like a frog’s neck.”

  Nate remarked, “I heard the rapids at Hell Gate were treacherous.”

  “Depends on the season,” Molly said. “Depends on who’s piloting the boat. The locals sail through all the time to fish in the sound.”

  In the distance the sergeant major, drawing out his words, could be heard crying, “Fix … bayonets.” Nate, preoccupied, mumbled, “Folks in my neck of Connecticut have a saying: You can’t plow a field by turning it over in your head. We’ve seen all we need to. Let’s go.”

  Here’s where Nate figures out what the lobsters are hatching and devises a scheme to thwart them:

  NATE AND MOLLY DOUBLED BACK toward Brookland, taking their sweet time so as not to arrive before the Tories guarding the roadblocks had been relieved by the afternoon shift. They left the buck cart behind a shed near the waterfront and the mare in a fenced-in field, tipped a teenage boy to keep an eye on both and crowded onto the flat ferry to New York City, arriving as the sun was setting behind the Jersey ridges. A silken breeze blew in from the Narrows, ruffling curtains in open windows. The wide city streets were filled with mounds of uncollected garbage that crawled with rats as large as rabbits. Several children with homemade bows and arrows stalked the rats, but they scurried away into the garbage before the hunters could get a shot at them. The barricades that the colonials had thrown up on the approaches to the river had been demolished by the lobsters and piled in heaps against the sides of buildings. Nate spotted a Rooms to Let sign on a sprawling clapboard house a block up from the ferry landing and knocked on the door. He started to turn away when the landlady, fixing her shrewd eyes on him, announced that there was only one room and one bed available, but turned back when he felt Molly’s elbow jabbing into his spine. He paid for the room and scrawled an invented name on the ledger in the hallway, caught Molly’s eyebrows arched suggestively and hastily added “and wife” after his signature. Nate hefted his wooden kit onto his shoulder and he and Molly followed the landlady up two flights to a small back room with a window with leaded panes looking out on a vegetable garden. There was a high narrow bed against one wall, a ceramic basin under a hand pump against the other wall. For decoration there was a broken banjo clock and a line portrait of George III that had been torn from a magazine and framed.