Infernal Revolutions

by Stephen Woodville

  Yet after a week the novelty of even these attractions wore off, and I was eager to be out of New York to see what else the colonies had to offer. I was as glad as I was surprised therefore when one day I was called out of parade by Corporal Tibbs and told that Lieutenant Wriggle wanted to see me in his quarters. Wondering what the Precocious One had up his sleeve, I was escorted to a big house on Queen Street. Once past the sentry and a mill of officers talking earnestly in the entrance hall, we were led upstairs to a room on the spacious landing. After knocking, and some distant sound that we took for Enter!, we stepped into an enormous, dazzling room, at the end of which, at a desk, I could just about make out Pubescent Pete, with Hartley lying on a rug beside him. Corporal Tibbs was dismissed, and I took the long walk up to Pete with mouth agape at all the splendours on show. It was a white airy sundrenched room, bracing to mind and spirit, with pastel blue and yellow wallpaper depicting scenes of Italian ruins and the Four Seasons. There were pedimented doorways, moulded cornices, panelled walls and long pine floorboards, as well as a magnificent chandelier that hung like a golden sun from the middle of the ceiling. Elegant mahogany furniture upholstered in pale green set off the lightness to create an overall effect of grace, beauty and class. It made the dining room at Philpott Hall – formerly the finest interior I had ever seen – look dark, dingy and depressing in comparison, and I was duly stunned.

  ‘A bit bigger than your cabin in the Twinkle, Pete,’ I said, my head still revolving around in wonder, ‘In fact, almost as big the Twinkle itself. And probably worth considerably more.’

  ‘Please keep your voice down,’ whispered Pete, motioning me to a seat, ‘I don’t know who might be listening at the door.’

  ‘They’d need the hearing of a bat to make out what we’re saying,’ I said, before all my attention became fixed on a bowl of luscious-looking plums on Pete’s desk.

  ‘Yes, it’s a big room, is it not?’ He must have looked around and assured himself that further caution was unnecessary, for he continued at his normal conversational squeak. ‘I’ve landed lucky here, Harry. Very comfortable. My father would be pleased for me.’

  ‘Plums, Pete, plums.’

  ‘Ah yes, the empurpled orbs of the American Cornucopia. Help yourself, Harry. In fact, I think I’ll join you.’

  We each took one and then sat back to admire the room further. In fact, we sat there so long, sucking and munching, that I became convinced that this rapturous idolatry was the whole purpose of my visit.

  ‘Lovely,’ I said eventually, satiated at last with both plums and room, ‘very beautiful. Shall I get Corporal Tibbs to escort me back now?’

  ‘Oh, er, no,’ said the Wonder, clearing his throat and hurriedly sitting upright. ‘I asked you here for a reason. Another reason, that is.’

  ‘Aye?’ I said suspiciously.

  ‘I’ve been watching you marching, Harry. You’re looking bored.’

  ‘Aye, well I am bored. And frustrated. You watch, I’ll drill and march, drill and march, seeing nothing but another redcoat’s back, then on my first day in action I’ll be shot through the head. I won’t even have the satisfaction of seeing new places. ‘Tis a dog’s life, Pete.’

  I looked instinctively at Hartley as I said this. He sensed me looking at him, raised one eye to me, and started growling.

  ‘You have too great an expectation of life, Harry. You should take a leaf from the book of the little orphans who get stuck up chimneys or who fall into spinning jennies. They aren’t the slightest bit surprised at their fate. As a rank and file member of the British Army you should expect to be bored and frustrated; this is not a Grand Tour after all.’

  He paused in his annoyingly rational diagnosis, and looked at me strangely.

  ‘But there is an alternative to drilling, Harry.’

  ‘There is?’

  ‘But ‘tis extremely dangerous, and calls for mental and physical resilience of the highest order.’

  I rose from my chair and made for the door.

  ‘But you get to see places,’ called Pete, with some desperation. ‘Much satisfaction to be had if you survive. You’d also help me out no end.’

  Appealing to my sense of bravery was futile when I was sober, but PP knew by now that an appeal as a friend often drew forth from me the most idiotic response. ‘Harry, I’ve just shot a young boy; my gun went off by mistake. Can I say it was you? Please, Harry.’ ‘Oh, all right then, give me the gun and you run off home.’ The flaws in my emotional makeup were so numerous that I often wondered if I were fully sane.

  I trotted back to him.

  ‘What is it, and how would it help you out?’

  Hartley gave a single sweep of his shaggy tail, as if warming to me more.

  ‘Spying, Harry. A most honourable activity. I have received a despatch requesting volunteers to sally forth into the Hackensack Valley, wherever that is. If no-one is forthcoming, they make the lieutenant go, viz. me.’

  ‘Spying is a most honourable activity, though, Pete.’

  ‘Only when performed voluntarily, Harry,’ he evaded. ‘For me ‘twould mean the end of my career.’

  ‘While for me – if I survived – ‘twould mean glory?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘I’m a fool, Pete, to be even listening to you.’

  ‘But deep down,’ went on Pete, pushing his luck, ‘don’t you crave adventure and excitement?’

  ‘Aye, deep down I do. But I keep those things firmly locked up in my Daydream and Fantasy Drawer.’

  Pete raised the stakes further.

  ‘I have it on high authority that should you come back with information valuable to our cause, then your release from the army will be sanctioned, and you will find yourself on the next troop ship home.’

  This seemed too good an offer to be true. I struggled to find objections.

  ‘How long will I be away for? A week, a year, the duration of the war?’

  ‘Anything from two weeks to two months; it all depends on what you discover. But you will need to be back here by mid-November at the latest.’

  ‘Why?’

  Pete tapped his nose with his forefinger.

  ‘Military secret, Harry.’

  I sighed again, and acquiesced.

  ‘All right then, I’ll do it. Let’s hasten whatever Fate has in store for me.’

  ‘Harry, I-I-I don’t know how to thank you.’

  Tears were clearly imminent from the emotional youngster, so I got in first with what I thought were sophisticated demands.

  ‘I’ll need new garb, you know, preferably something black and moody; failing that rusty autumnal for camouflage. I’ll need a wad of dollars and pen and paper. A map I suppose would help too. A compass. And the whole thing would be more enjoyable if I could take a friend with me as a travelling companion, say Dick Lickley. For mutual protection and a bit of a lark.’

  ‘Would you like a gilded carriage as well?’

  ‘Can it be arranged?’

  Pete looked at me for a minute, then leaned up to slap me matily on the shoulder. His action did not seem natural though, somehow, and his hand bunched clumsily on my upper arm.

  ‘You’re a card, Harry. And a star. And a tower of strength.’

  I cut him short, before he reached The Hanged Man.

  ‘So you know nothing about this Hackensack place?’

  ‘Let me see if there is anything here…’ He shuffled randomly through the papers strewn over his desk, then gave a cry of astonishment. ‘Aha…here we are…yes…’tis a valley about fifteen miles long on the other side of the Hudson River, lying parallel to it…beautiful apparently…lots of rich people live there in their big houses.’

  ‘Then why is it so dangerous?’

  Pete’s eyes lit up at the question; this was one he could answer without looking at his papers. Unable to resist, he laid on the sarcasm thickly but charmingly.

  ‘Hmmm, let me think now�
�is it because we are British and they are American?’

  ‘What I mean is, rich happy people are not much inclined to fight, generally speaking.’

  ‘Ah well…’ started the boy, back on rocky ground again, ‘…this lot must be. Or perhaps they have enough money to pay for the toughest Rebels to do their fighting for them.’

  ‘Mmm, a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.’

  Surprised to hear his improvised answer praised, Pete assumed an air of great importance, as though he had just made a strategic discovery that would change the course of the entire war.

  ‘So,’ I continued, while Pete mentally preened himself, ‘when do you want me to go?’

  As Pete started rummaging through his papers again, I went to the window and looked up at the lovely blue sky, not a cloud in it.

  ‘May as well go as soon as possible, I suppose,’ I said in answer to my own question, my unaccustomed eagerness propelled by two factors: the desire to get into something more comfortable than an army uniform, and fear that I would start having doubts about the enterprise if I dallied much longer.

  ‘Good,’ said Pete, squinting at a piece of paper that may have been relevant, ‘that’s the spirit. We’ll get the necessary papers signed and arrange a briefing for Dick and yourself on the Art of Spying. With luck, assuming we can get our spymaster away from his whore in good time, you’ll be on the six o’clock ferry to New Jersey.’

  So I sat down and waited while a runner was sent to retrieve Dick from his dreary drilling, and Pete fussed about with papers that looked too scruffy to be official. Curious, I picked up one that had fallen on the floor. It simply read: ‘Butter – jam – mustard’. I gingerly dropped it – for I realized too late that it was smeared in a greasy mixture of tallow fat and horsehair – and let it flutter onto his desk.

  ‘Not much to entrance future scholars there, Pete.’

  Pete looked up and eyed the rogue report, then scratched the back of his ear with his pen and shook his head in perplexity.

  Leaving the flustered youth to his paperwork, I took out my pipe and tamped a plug of tobacco in. Then, in an attempt to blot out fears for my future prospects, I picked up an old New York Gazette that was lying on a side table. According to Pete it had been left, along with the house, by one Mrs Schofield as soon as the first masts of the British fleet had appeared on the horizon. Whatever its provenance, I tucked into the four pages with relish, ravenous for any form of the written word. Delighted at the quaintness of the front-page advertisements and the childlike prose of its shipping, theatre and business announcements, I turned chuckling to the inner meat, which turned out to consist solely of a leader entitled To The Citizens Of New York. Trembling with anticipation, I took a chair, lit my pipe and settled down for a good sneer at the ludicrous pretensions of these people. At first I was not disappointed, and I cackled as I read the raging hyperbole, in which words like liberty, freedom, happiness, independence, justice and equality flourished like weeds in manure. Clearly everyone had wanted these things from the year Dot, but just because some slaveowning southern lawyer had popped up with his Declaration of Independence and put these desires into florid cursive handwriting, it did not mean they were going to get them. ‘Twas all a lot of nonsense to flannel the gullible with, especially the Pursuit of Happiness bit: I’d been pursuing it for twenty-one years and the effort had just about wrecked me. But my enjoyment at this nonsense turned to trepidation when a paragraph followed entitled Advice On The Imminent British Occupation Of Our City. Get Out seemed to be the gist of it, or if unable to get out (elderly, infirm, wriggly pink orphaned babies), Passively Resist. To those who could but wouldn’t (Tory Loyalists, the odd urban Indian, whores, usurers, drunkards) it wished a speedy death. Building up to a moralistic, patriotic finale, it went on to assure both evacuees and passive resistors that the most ferocious partisan warfare ever known to man would be waged on the British in the Hackensack Valley. Crude drawings were provided, for the dim of imagination, of the sort of treatment the British soldier or spy could expect if caught there. One of them bore a strong resemblance to Mr Hogarth’s painting The Reward of Cruelty; many of them seemed improvements on Spanish Inquisition models of torture; all of them involved the shoving of some hard and sharp implement into the softest and most vulnerable organs of the poor captured British body.

  Queasy, lightheaded, I put the paper down and requested of Pete another plum to calm my nerves. He tossed one over – which Hartley almost intercepted with a leap of salmonlike strength and agility – and asked if anything was wrong.

  ‘I’ve just been reading about my probable end if I get caught on this spying caper. It seems that one day you might be reading your official despatches by the light of a candle made from my intestines.’

  Hartley aggressively trotted up to me – his urine breath all over me – and stared with steady concentration first at the plum in my hand, and then at my mouth, as if gauging the fit. Needing to take my fear out on someone, I fondled the little juicebomb within an inch of the hound’s slobbering jaws, and showed him every aspect of its ripe contours. Then, just as he was starting to shudder and salivate with the torment of it all, I gave him a sharp and unexpected flick on his rubbery nose, which he hated. An instinctive snarl, a pathetic whimper, and he was off behind Pete’s desk, his eyes watering up. I ate the plum quickly.

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t believe anything they write in there,’ said Pete with all the insouciance of youth, death unimaginable. ‘They’re all hot air, Americans.’

  ‘Have you met one yet?’

  ‘Well…no…but I’ve spoken to people, read things, inhaled the atmosphere of the place. Take the name Continental Army, for example. What other nation would have the gall to call fifty ragged farmers an army, let alone a continental one?’

  I agreed that was a point.

  ‘Then you have their Declaration of Independence. Declaration of hot air, more like. Strife, puberty and the pursuit of women. Put any words in there and the buggers’ll cheer, as long as the rhythm and the…the…something…is right. What’s the word I’m looking for, Harry? You’re the literary man.’

  ‘Euphony? Cadence? I don’t know.’

  ‘Brilliant. That’s it. One of those. Perhaps both. So long as the rhythm and the euphony or cadence is right. Worth remembering that, if you’re called upon to make an impromptu speech in the Haversack Valley.’

  ‘Speech! Me?’

  I was aghast anew. After Parson Blood’s humiliation I feared public speaking more than I feared evisceration. If someone told me I had five years to live I would accept the fact with aplomb, but if they told me I had to make a big public speech in five years’ time I would probably be forced to commit suicide, just to end the intolerable anxiety.

  Pete laughed.

  ‘You really are a frightful coward, Harry, when it boils down to it.’

  ‘Blathering senselessly isn’t my strong point, that’s all. I’m more of a deep independent thinker, interested more in ultimate truth than rabble rousing.’

  ‘Even if it’s a matter of life and death, Harry, as it might be out in that hellish valley?’

  I fear I turned nasty and resentful at this gratuitous goading.

  ‘This is astounding stuff, sir, coming from so poor a speaker as yourself; you, a veritable tongue-tied tomato head. You seem to be patronizing me, just because you’ve made a few terrible speeches to the men and I haven’t. I am not afraid of public speaking, you know.’

  ‘I think you are, Harry, a little,’ answered the youth quietly, perhaps a little cowed at my outburst. ‘As I was, a lot. Still am. I’m not implying I’m any good at it, or suggesting you wouldn’t be, I’m just trying to get you used to the idea for your own good. I’m just trying to be a good lieutenant, Harry.’

  With that, he swept the paperwork aside, laid his head on his folded arms, and started crying.

  I felt terrible for being such a cowardly tetchy prig. I looked ov
er with sorrow at the desolation I’d caused. Four hurt and swimming eyes – two human, two canine – looked back at me. Quickly I tugged my handkerchief out of my pocket, and had a good blubber myself. Then Dick Lickley and someone who was probably the Spymaster entered, and viewed us with wonder.

  ‘Someone dead, man?’ asked Dick, using the argot he had picked up on his tour of the negro haunts.

  ‘Either that or someone’s stolen their knitting,’ said the Spymaster in a loud aside, before addressing us directly. ‘Come, come, ladies, things cannot be that bad.’

  Pete, Hartley and I all looked at the Spymaster with snivelly hatred. He was a particularly raddled specimen of English manhood, toothpick thin, two front teeth sticking out at an oblique angle, dirty shirt flapping outside his breeches, frogged jacket, and shoes filthy except for a branded pair of H’s where his buckles had been. This, according to Pete, was the only man in the British army who had read Machiavelli, hence his appointment. His name, as if he expected us to believe him, was Taylor Woodbine, and he’d learned his trade, he told us proudly, in the backstreets of Cheadle Hulme, ‘a mighty megopolis near Manchester’, another stretch of our already strained credulity. He also had a charmless tendency to cock his leg up and rasp out wind loudly whenever the fancy took him, which was often. In a pigsty he would have stood out as a particularly uncouth animal, but here in this glorious room he was truly an affront to civilization. We didn’t like Mr Taylor Woodbine, or his smarmy hackneyed remark on our joint grief, which we had just been starting to enjoy. Even Hartley, that finely perceptive animal, his eyes now dry, kept a permanent suspicious growl on him.