I nodded bravely.
‘Will this make amends, my darling Harry?’
She shuffled over to me on her knees, and smothered me with hair and kisses. Pleasure soon heightened to ecstasy when she took my baubles in her hands, and proceeded to caress them tenderly. ‘Twas shameful, really, the dividends that barefaced lying paid, but I was able to assuage my guilt with the knowledge that full disclosure of my position could not be much longer delayed, Dick or no Dick. For I was, I fancy, in love with the girl, and ‘twas only fair that in return for the pleasure she’d given me, she should have the pleasure of handing me over to the Continental Army for hanging, if she so wished. I was easy on the score, being destined for a grisly end anyway sooner or later. I felt sure this would not come to pass just yet, however, for if this was not true love blowing down my ear, I did not know what was.
Love, or whatever it was, being followed by breakfast, whatever that was, for I dare not query further any unfamiliar item, we were set up for a day of sightseeing around Bergen County, or so I thought.
‘Really, Harry. Sometimes I wonder what country you think you’re living in. Since when has leisure here ever been anything but the prerogative of the rich, and you cannot be rich if you have domestic duties to attend to, or creditors to evade.’
‘But there’s a war on,’ I cajoled, ‘all normal rules are suspended.’
‘Tell Mr Placquet that when I’m being whipped naked for desertion.’
A shudder of sexual excitement went through me, but I regained control.
‘Seems that this Mr Placquet has a greater hold on you than you care to admit.’
This clearly touched a raw nerve, for Sophie flared up out of all proportion to the question.
‘I’ve already told you – I will leave him when I’m good and ready, not before. I have plans of my own, you know. I am not going to abandon them for the whims of a passing stranger.’
‘Stranger!’ I exclaimed, aghast. ‘But you’ve tasted my very salts, Madam! After last night, how much more intimate can you get?’
‘You loved me with your body all right, but how do I know what was going on in your mind?’
‘I couldn’t love you with my body if my mind wasn’t in it.’
‘Aye, that’s what they all say,’ she replied tartly, before adding, perhaps in response to the look of horror that must have crossed my face: ‘Or so Nancy tells me.’
‘So when will you make your move?’ I asked after several minutes of heavy silence, in which I tasted the full bitterness of Love’s ashes – a far worse state than hopeful celibacy. ‘Because by my estimation you have until Christmas at the most before the British arrive and make your decisions for you. What difference can a few weeks possibly make?’
‘They’ll not get hold of me, those Dogs.’
‘I do not see how you can prevent them getting hold of you – except, as I say, by running away.’
Sophie smiled strangely, as if things of import were on her mind. This made me think I had not done my sexual job properly after all.
‘Do you know what my main problem is at the moment, Harry? The one that really prevents my otherwise-willing departure from this God-forsaken place?’
‘I do not, Madam,’ I answered, all ears and trepidation. ‘No, not I.’
‘Muskets,’ said Sophie. ‘Muskets, balls and powder. Lack of.’
I smiled and sighed with relief. The poor, vulnerable girl!
‘Sophie, you do not need such things if you come with me. I have a pistol, you have seen it. I will protect you with my life, you need have no fear. Every hair of your head is precious to me, and if one is so much as tweaked by a roguish trooper, I will personally stake him to the ground and blow apart every joint in his damned body, until he cries out to his Maker for mercy!’
‘What?’ said Sophie, whose face now wore a decidedly abstracted expression.
A little put out by this utterance, I was nevertheless willing to embark on a recapitulation of my main themes. I had not got far, however, before Sophie discomposed me again.
‘No, no, no. You have the wrong end of the stick, Harry. I do not want firearms to protect myself. I want them to arm my girls.’
‘Your girls?’
‘Aye – the Liberty Belles. We’re only ten strong at the moment, now that Rebecca Gillespie has gone down with smallpox, but we’re vicious. No Tory is safe when we fan out through the countryside, particularly no Tory men. You see, unlike the boys you saw yesterday, all mouth and breeches, we do our work with discreet efficiency, and don’t brag about it.’
‘And what is your work?’ I asked, frankly astonished at all this.
Sophie looked at me, a Quakerish light in her eyes.
‘Circumcision mainly, with a little castration on the side. For those who merit it.’
I laughed uncomfortably.
‘Though no-one has merited it yet. We’re saving that delight for the first Lobsterback we catch.’
I laughed even more uncomfortably.
‘Yes, my boy!’ Sophie’s eyes shone bright with revolutionary fervour, slapping her hand on my thigh, and picking up the nearest hard-boiled egg to hand. ‘Cut them off, then stuff them in his mouth – like this – and make him eat them!’
Sophie’s cheeks distended as the egg testicle rolled around. Her eyes bulged with a most realistic look of feigned horror, while mine bulged with horror less feigned. Then she clamped her jaws together, and chewed vigorously. I almost passed out.
‘Harry – you’ve gone faint again,’ spluttered Sophie, egg debris spraying out with the words. ‘Don’t tell me eggs are taboo as well.’
‘I am a poet of sorts,’ I panted after a couple of dry retches. ‘Which means that if you show me an egg and say it is a testicle, then to me it is a testicle, and if that egg is bitten into and eaten, while the illusion is still strong, then naturally, as a man with testicles of his own, I am affected most sensibly.’
With a succession of hard swallows Sophie despatched the egg mush to her stomach, took a deep breath, belched loud and long, apologized, and announced authoritatively:
‘Then this war will be a trial to you, Sir, unless you shut down your imagination for the duration…and, I might add, your gullibility.’
‘My gullibility?’
‘Oh Harry,’ Sophie laughed out loud, ‘you do not really think we castrate our enemies, do you? We may be backward here compared to New York, but we’re not Indians.’
I heaved a genuine sigh of relief.
‘Then there’s no Liberty Belles either?’
‘Oh yes, the Liberty Belles exist sure enough, but ‘tis mainly a defensive association at the moment, designed to keep marauding men of all parties out of our petticoats. Everyone is talking about the rights of man, but what about the rights of women, what about them? We are very vulnerable, you know, especially in times of war, when men believe they have a right to do anything to us just because death is near.’
‘I suppose so; but not all men are bad, you know. And not all bad people are men. In fact, there are probably as many bad women as bad men around.’
The response to this, unsurprisingly, was swift and hot.
‘Don’t give me that old hogwash, you self-satisfied complacent prig! Too many books have addled your sense of values, ‘tis clear. We may not be perfect, but women are angels compared to men, and that’s a fact not to be denied.’
‘Twas not even a fact in my book, let alone one not to be denied, but I let the remark pass, not wanting to waste valuable time in futile argument.
‘A Crimes Diary is kept in which all Tory misdemeanours are noted,’ went on Sophie, cooling down quickly. ‘If the crimes are too bad or become too persistent, then we strike hard and hot deep into the perpetrator’s vitals. Or will do, when we are fully armed and trained.’
‘And how do you propose to do that in so short a space of time?’
‘Well – though perhaps I should n
ot be telling you this – the plan was for each of us to find a stranger at the Hackensack Muster and encourage him to drink to excess. Then we were to lure him to a field somewhere and rob him of his weapons whilst he was distracted with thoughts of lechery. I should have known, though, that the mere act of attending anything so rowdy as a Muster would prove too daunting for the majority of my girls, most of whom would not say boo to a goose, let alone abduct a man. Nancy turned up, of course, though I doubt she was much interested in the robbery part of the plan, being a Griswold.’
I was all for honesty when it served a purpose, but to let cats of this size out of the bag suggested that Sophie possessed neither sensitivity nor prudence, and was therefore ill-suited as a travelling companion to a poetic spy.
‘I see,’ I said coldly. ‘So when we first met I was no more to you than a potential flintlock on legs…and here was I thinking…’
‘Thinking what?’ interrupted Sophie sharply, to my great surprise. ‘That I’d made eyes at you because you were the nicest, kindest, best-looking man I’d ever seen?’
Put into words, the notion did sound ridiculous, admittedly. Who was I to compare myself to the grotesquely handsome local boys, whose rude, woodchopping health and cheerful disposition lay in almost polar opposition to the sulking malcontent image I fancied I projected? A dangerous emotional mixture of shame and anger began to bubble away inside me, and the result might well have been an explosion, had not Sophie staggered me again with another shot through the vitals.
‘Because, glare at me as you will, I did make eyes at you because you were the nicest, kindest, best-looking man I’d ever seen.’
Unaware that I had been glaring, I looked away immediately, and quickly tried to fathom the implications of Sophie’s unexpected rejoinder.
‘Aye, nicest and kindest-looking,’ I corrected sullenly. ‘You did not know at first glance that I was either nice or kind.’
‘I know what I know,’ said Sophie cryptically, before moving in for the emotional kill. ‘And my instincts were proved right when I came back this morning and found you still here. Any other man would have been off like a shot once he’d filled his boots.’
‘I might have been too,’ I said, the role of devil’s advocate now giving me great pleasure, ‘if my horse had not been taken away from me.’
‘Well,’ said Sophie, smiling craftily as she reached over to caress my nick-nacks, ‘there is that.’
Clearly, the Oysterman Psyche was not such a puzzle to Sophie as it was to me, and yet again I was a soothed baby in her hands, all rebellion crushed.
I gurgled contentedly, the uncynical recipient of True Love. Reconciled, we were transformed into a pair of dove pigeons, cooing and billing for all we were worth. We paid each other prodigious compliments, we vowed vows that slapped Nemesis in the face, we conjectured about Eternity – all in a baby talk that would have frozen Pope’s marrow. But for all that we were far from being the archetypal Smug Young Couple, who, finding Love, proceed to laugh from the ramparts at others trying to reach it. No, rather we wished everybody else could find what we had found, for then the world would not have one hothead in it, and it would slumber idyllically, like a giant contented gonad whirling in space.
‘So what’s it to be,’ said Sophie quickly and breathlessly, as if unsure of the answer. ‘Stay here with me, safe from your creditors, or leave me all alone, and go chasing after your debtors? I need to know one way or the other, if I’m not to fall apart emotionally.’
I pretended to ponder the offer, inwardly quaking at the scenario Sophie had painted: it was one thing sightseeing with Dick by my side, quite another having no bully companion at all.
‘I’ll stay then,’ I said, almost forgetting to feign reluctance.
‘Oh Harry!’
‘Aye,’ I reiterated, emboldened by Sophie’s hugs, ‘I’ll stay. Why not? A man cannot be forever at his business, despite what Mr Franklin and the religious zealots would have us believe. After what happened to my shop in New York, a rest may be just what I need.’
‘Who said anything about a rest?’
I laughed, quite charmed by American humour, something I had not expected to find.
‘No, I’m serious, Harry. I want you to help me.’
‘Help you? With what?’
‘Why, the training of my girls, of course.’
‘And how can I help you with that?’
‘By teaching them how to shoot properly.’
‘I know nothing about guns; no, not I.’
I shook my jowls fiercely, in the approved Johnsonian manner, hoping she had not seen me shoot the turkeys at the muster. ‘I may carry a pistol, but I cannot fire it to save my life.’
‘Why, you little fibber, Harry. I heard about your exploits at the turkey shoot.’
‘Pure chance, madam.’
‘That’s not what Captain Bartlett of the Continental Army thought. He was all for signing you up there and then, and would have done, had you not vanished so quickly into the crowd, for all the world like a Damned Spy. I get to hear these things.’
‘Then God help Bergen County when the British come, if Captain Bartlett is its best judge of marksmanship,’ was my sour response to this gratifying revelation.
‘Well, whether you are as bad as you say you are or not, you cannot deny that you’ve actually fired one, and in my brigade that automatically makes you a seasoned campaigner. Now, Sir, will you help me or not?’
I pondered. Much as I sympathized with the girls’ plight, be damned if I was going to help them to blow holes in Pubescent Pete, Thomas Pomeroy and the rest of the bashful in the 85th Foot. Knowing their fear of girls was even greater than mine, I could easily imagine a clumsy approach – all staring eyes, knocking knees and asthmatic wheezing – being misinterpreted as a prelude to a vicious sexual attack, with disastrous consequences for all concerned. Remembering the teachings of Taylor Woodbine, I slipped into slimy Machiavellian mode. Anything, really, to relieve the increasing pressure on my plums.
‘All right, I will help, as you wish. If that must be a condition of my stay, then so be it. Though I warn you, I could do more harm than good. I am a peaceable bookseller, not a Green Mountain Boy.’
Sophie released her grip, and glowed with triumph. I began to light up a soothing pipe.
‘Oh, and there is another condition of your stay too.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘No smoking in the barn – ‘tis a fire hazard. Besides, ‘tis a foul habit for a cultured man like you. Indians smoke, not gentlemen.’
‘’Tis a venerable activity, Madam,’ I said, hackles mildly rising. ‘spiritual, reflective and mollifying. The smoke symbolizes the transience of life, or the Holy Ghost, and reminds us that there is a higher purpose to life than mere physical existence.’
‘You’ve got me to remind you of that now. So put it out, Harry, before I put you out.’
This was stated forcefully, but in such a pleasant tone, that I could not take umbrage. Meekly Machiavellian, I put it away with a great show of hurt.
‘Anything else? Just so that I know exactly where I stand.’
‘You can make love to me any time you want.’
This seemed to be adequate recompense for almost any indignity, but a sudden access of shyness and doubt prevented my taking immediate advantage of the offer. Whores said this sort of thing, surely, not ladies, and I did not want Sophie to be a whore. Troubled, I had to seek immediate clarification. I gulped and blurted it out.
‘Sophie, answer me truthfully now, as I have been truthful with you. Have you ever said what you just said to anybody else?’
‘No, sweetie, why?’
‘’Tis just that…well, it seems too good to be true.’
‘I am too good to be true!’ said Sophie brightly. ‘The thing is, no-one had ever noticed me as a woman before you came along. And for that I am determined to give you everything I have, one way or another. Now come he
re, ye tender dog.’
By now in full flood, I was pulled to the floor by an equally tearful Sophie, and we made sniffly, slobbery love with great feeling.
However, Life being Life, our harmonious murmurings were soon interrupted; this time by the distant calls of a human voice. I could not make out what was being shouted, but Sophie, obviously more attuned to the sound than I, shot up immediately.
‘’Tis Verne!’ she gasped. ‘My God, what time is it?’
‘Time to go home, obviously.’
‘Then I must go. Quickly.’
With disheartening obedience for one so naturally rebellious, Sophie clambered upright using my shoulder as a support.
‘Sophie,’ I pleaded, ‘is this the action of a girl who has formed her own Revolutionary Brigade? Take your time, let him wait. He’s a Tory, you said so yourself.’
‘I’m sorry, I have to go. Hide the hoecakes if you can’t bear the look of them, or feed them to the cows when I’m gone. If anyone approaches, hide in the hayloft. If you want something to do, there’s a river packed full of fish about half a mile to the east of here. You will find a fishing net somewhere about. Don’t let anyone see you leave or enter the barn though.’
‘But what if they do?’ I queried.
‘Make something up,’ she said, without any hint of irony that I could detect. ‘’Tis unlikely anyone will see you though. No-one comes around this part of the farm now that the harvest is in.’ She reached up to kiss me. ‘I will return at sunset with your supper, provided I am not detained. Be good.’
Sunset? Supper? It seemed churlish to complain after a night of such wondrous amorous delights, but I was not happy at being left in this way, or for so long. After the door had been shut on me, I sat around listlessly for a minute or two, then suddenly remembered that I had a spyglass in my saddlebag, and could view the loathsome Verne in the flesh. Curiosity overcoming despondency, I dug out the glass and hurried up to the hayloft. There I found a suitable gap in the planks, and, after bracing myself, trained the glass on the little waiting figure in the distance.
Joyously astonished, I found my Love Rival to be small, stupid-looking and plug ugly. Dressed in a dirty smock, he had the facial features of a constipated weasel, and the deportment of Richard the Third. I was still chuckling when, to my horror, Sophie reached him and kissed him, apparently voluntarily. This gave rise to two disturbing thoughts: one, what had nature given Verne in recompense for such a bad hand in the Looks department?; and two, what if, through low self-esteem, I was devaluing my attractions, and throwing them away on someone who thought Verne was kissable? Love, I was learning, was far more of a mental than a physical activity, and I was still at it, pacing the barn deep in thought, a good two hours later, when I finally decided enough was enough.
Infernal Revolutions Page 33