Bunker Hill

by Howard Fast

  Gage and his wife Margaret were already there, as was Howe, along with a tea merchant, John Stibble by name, late forties, and a dark, handsome woman who was his wife. There was a widowed Mrs. Plunkett—her husband had been an officer in the marines— and two toothy young ladies in their twenties to complete a genteel pairing with the British generals.

  Madeira and sherry were being served by a man in livery. Clinton reflected upon the fact that in this half-abandoned town, where a population was being slowly starved by twelve thousand rebels who encircled the place, there was nevertheless no shortage of anything the rich required. He and Burgoyne were moved around and introduced, Mrs. Plunkett clapping onto Burgoyne, to whom she insisted upon being distantly related. When Hallsbury brought Clinton to his wife, the people in the room marked the contrast, Howe, so large and dark and slow of movement and speech, and Clinton and the woman, both of them pale and fair, their blue eyes grasping at and holding each other. Against them, Howe was Calaban, a clumsy, shuffling beast who was suddenly speechless as Clinton and Mrs. Hallsbury recognized each other’s need. She gave Clinton her hand, smiled her most dazzling smile, and murmured how delighted she was finally to meet Sir Henry Clinton, of whom she had heard so much.

  “Well, he’s yours for the evening, my dear,” her husband said, the haughty, aristocratic churchman suddenly humble and beseeching.

  It was a very quick and subtle byplay, yet Clinton marked it as he said the required thing. “Much that is bad, Mrs. Hallsbury, but certainly very little that is good. I am charmed.”

  “Ah, no, no, indeed, Sir Henry. Much that is good.”

  “Which proves that no one speaks the plain truth about anything,” Howe put in. “You interrupt a first-rate lecture upon strategy, Henry.”

  “I fear for you, Sir William,” Clinton said lightly. “To lecture the loveliest woman in the colonies on anything is all too close to the original sin.”

  “Dear gentlemen, I will have no talk of sin tonight. My husband is well versed on the subject, and I am his apt pupil.” She threw her smile from one to another. “You cannot imagine how delighted we are to have Britain’s proudest generals not simply in Boston but here in our house tonight. Oh, I know that wisdom and courage are so matter-of-fact to you. But think of a poor woman living day to day in a jungle. And good Sir William here was only reassuring me that we have nothing to fear. So you must not scold him, Sir Henry.”

  Clinton felt magnanimous. “But no one scolds Sir William,” he hastened to explain. “Not even the king. And Sir William is my commander, you know.”

  “Bosh,” said Howe.

  “I will have no favorites. I have seated myself between you.”

  At the table, Clinton waited for the pressure of her knee. The game had begun earlier. Mrs. Hallsbury was a user, a manipulator. She used Howe because to an observer it was plain that a woman flirting with two men was less serious than a woman flirting with one. She used her aging husband with something less than contempt. And she was using Clinton to assuage an aching loneliness and desire so desperate it came to Clinton like a silent scream. Yet she played the game step by step. When she took his hand, there was a slight extra pressure, and coming into dinner, she mentioned in a whisper only for him that some of the red Indians in her land were loath to reveal their true names for fear it gave one power over them. “My name is Prudence,” she said. “Does that give you power over me?”

  “I would not want such power,” he answered gallantly. “Still, it is unquestionably one of those damned Puritan names.”

  “I am married to a High Church priest, sir. And do you always swear in front of women, or is that the current fashion in London?”

  “Forgive me the swearing. I will forgive you the marriage.”

  “You are too bold, sir, and rather nasty.” And with that, she turned her conversation to Howe, who sat at her right.

  Mr. Stibble was regaling the table with a monologue on the British Empire and the tea trade. Burgoyne was finding Mrs. Plunkett interesting. And Sir William Howe was listening to Mrs. Hallsbury when Clinton felt the first pressure of her knee. Then her leg caressed his, and he dropped his right hand beneath his napkin to rest on her thigh. She turned from Howe to Clinton, and their eyes met.

  “I think,” Clinton whispered, barely moving his lips, conscious that her husband was watching them, “that I want you more than anything on earth.”

  “More than a great victory, Sir Henry?” She smiled. “And in a battle, do you move so directly and quickly?”

  “I do.”

  Her light, high-pitched voice cut across the tea merchant’s peroration like a knife. She demanded, “Then how would you see us out of our predicament, Sir Henry?”

  The tea merchant halted in mid-sentence, and the table listened. “I would take two thousand men,” said Clinton, “and I would deal with them as I would with a snake.”

  “And how does one deal with a snake, Sir Henry?” Gage asked.

  Aware that he was speaking only for her, boasting the way a small boy does, yet becoming increasingly enamored of his words as he spoke them, Clinton said, “I would slice through the belly first, and then I would cut off the head, and then I would cut off the tail.”

  “But my dear Sir Henry,” Burgoyne drawled, “A snake dies slowly. What if the head and the tail decided to come in here to Boston while you were dealing with the belly? That might be a bad show for our good friends here.”

  “Devil take all generals,” Howe said. “Here I sit with as fine a roast as I ever tasted in England, lovely ladies, and good company. I will not have this talk of war. To our host, gentlemen!” He raised his glass. “And to his lovely companion. I am a poor churchgoer, sir, but I pledge you my presence at your next service.”

  “Which may be a while off,” the Reverend Hallsbury replied sourly, “since my church is behind their lines—if indeed they have not burned it to the ground.”

  Gage drank the toast and reassured Hallsbury. “My intelligence is dependable, sir. As of tonight, your church still stands. They have some nasty ways, but they don’t burn churches.”

  Softly, Mrs. Hallsbury asked Clinton, “Were you just talking? Or would you do as you said you would?”

  “That I want you more than anything on earth?” he whispered.

  “Your two thousand soldiers, sir.”

  “I think I would,” he said slowly.

  “Will they listen to you?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have never fought in America. Only in Europe. They have.”

  “Why aren’t you the commander?”

  “Dear lady, the questions you ask.”

  “It would be better, Sir Henry, if you took your hand from my thigh. You are so hot with passion, sir, that I can smell it. If you continue to look at me that way, not only my husband but everyone at the table will know.”

  “I don’t give a damn for your husband.”

  “But I must give a damn for him, sir.”

  “As you might for your father or your grandfather.”

  “Your hand, Sir Henry.” He placed his hand upon the table, in conspicuous view. “You see, Sir Henry,” she went on, “we all fight our battles as best we may, and we are all in some sort of servitude. Isn’t that what your military discipline teaches you?”

  “Don’t make a fool of me.”

  “When you are so willing to make a fool of me?”

  “He’s old enough to be your grandfather.”

  “I think we have whispered enough. A few minutes are permissible. More than that invites scandal.” She raised her voice to catch her husband’s attention. “Sir Henry has been amusing me with his experiences in Europe. What a sight it must be to see two great armies in all their splendid ranks and uniforms meet in battle! I should think that no sight in all the world can equal it.”

  “I would think, my dear,” her husband replied, “that there is more agony than joy in a battle. Wouldn’t you say so, Sir William?”r />
  “Depends on who wins and who losses.”

  “As God wills it. God has blessed England.”

  “Not this past April,” Gage said.

  “That,” said Burgoyne, “was not a battle, if you will forgive me, Sir Thomas. They set on us like a pack of dogs, yet you brought our troops out of their country. The battle still awaits us.”

  “I sincerely hope not,” said Margaret Gage.

  “Then are we to live forever in this beleaguered city?” the reverend asked.

  Clinton took the opportunity to whisper to Mrs. Hallsbury, “I must see you.”

  “Perhaps. If our fates will it.”

  “To hell with our fates. Tonight.”

  “You know that is impossible.”

  “Nothing is impossible.”

  “I am not a British general, Sir Henry. I am a woman, and to a woman most things are impossible.”

  “Forgive me.”

  “There is nothing to forgive. I would like very much to see you alone, but tonight is impossible.”

  “For five minutes?”

  “What will five minutes achieve?”

  “Just to stand face-to-face with you, alone.”

  Mr. Stibble was talking about furniture. He had ordered a breakfront and ten chairs from the workshop of Mr. Thomas Chippendale. He wanted Burgoyne’s opinion of Mr. Chippendale’s work. Not that he would ever receive the shipment, the way things were today, but only to know what he would miss.

  Burgoyne was bored with Mr. Stibble. To sit at dinner with a man of great wealth in London, who might back a new play, was one thing; to do the same with a Continental ass was an imposition. Before he had an opportunity to reply with a sufficiently clever insult, Margaret Gage explained that the very chairs they were sitting on were out of Mr. Chippendale’s workshop.

  “Wait an hour after you leave,” Mrs. Hallsbury whispered. “There is an arbor behind the house.”

  After they had made their farewells, they went out to where Gage’s carriage was waiting. Clinton said that he thought he would walk and clear his head. “I would not advise it, Henry. The city isn’t safe at night.”

  “Safe enough.”

  “You’re not armed.”

  “He’s armed with his dreams,” Burgoyne said. “The lucky devil had all good things to himself. Do you want company, Henry?”

  “I’d as soon be alone,” Clinton replied. “Thank you.”

  As the carriage drove off, Burgoyne said, “He’s a surly devil, isn’t he?”

  “Ah, well, that’s understandable. The place is new to him. We’ve all fought here in the French wars.”

  “He grew up here, didn’t he?”

  “But not as a soldier. He feels isolated. He can’t understand why we don’t take two thousand regulars and march from one end of the continent to the other.”

  “I think you do him an injustice,” Margaret Gage said unexpectedly. “Perhaps he can’t understand why there should be a war at all.”

  Yet war was as far from Clinton’s thoughts as China as he walked slowly through the empty streets. It was almost midnight now, and the city was as dead and silent as some ancient, abandoned ruin. Not a sound, not a voice, not a light in any window. A pack of dogs came racing around a corner and swirled around Clinton, who ignored them. He suffered from many difficulties, but physical fear was not one of them. He found himself on King Street, and he walked slowly out onto the Long Wharf. There were soldiers on guard there, and they saluted him, but if they wondered what a general in full-dress regalia was doing wandering around Boston at this time of the night, they kept their silence and asked no questions. He walked to the end of the wharf. The moon was in the sky now, and the June night was warm and pleasant.

  Clinton stood at the end of the wharf, staring at the dark hulks of the British warships in the harbor. His ardor had cooled sufficiently for him to contemplate himself, a process that never brought him great satisfaction. In affairs of the heart or the groin, he always in time reduced his image to that of a small boy, with a small boy’s voyeuristic dreams, and now the spectacle of his headlong assault upon Mrs. Hallsbury made him feel both the fool and the lout. Nevertheless, he had the appointment, and peering at his watch in the pale moonlight, he realized that he had only enough time to return to the assignation.

  As he walked back through the deserted streets, his process of self-examination dwindled, and now he thought only of the fact that he had assaulted what was certainly one of the most beautiful women in the colonies and won at least her acquiescence, and all of it in whispers at a dinner table where her husband was present. With the name of Prudence she was either a Puritan or a Presbyterian, which only meant that the fires had never really been stoked. What had motivated her to marry the elderly High Church priest, he could not imagine, except that Hallsbury was very rich and that a few years she would endure as a wife might give her many years as a free and wealthy widow. All of which meant that she was manipulative and calculating, and the thought occurred to him that she had seduced him rather than the reverse. Well, be that as it may, she was beautiful and clever, and more than that he asked of no woman.

  His first reaction when he reached the house and moved stealthily through the garden to the back door was one of wretched disappointment. She was not there, and he had been made an utter fool. He stood in the moonlight, looking at the brick walks that edged the herb and rose gardens, deflated and humiliated, and then he heard her whisper, “Sir Henry?”

  He turned, and she was standing by the door. She came to him, took his arm, and silently led him to a grape arbor at the back of the garden. Still, he had spoken no word, and in the darkness of the arbor, he suddenly embraced her, found her mouth and then her tongue darting between his lips like the quick thrusts of a small snake. Then she drew away from him, breathing heavily.

  In the bits of moonlight that crept through the leaves, he saw her as a dappled, shadowy figure in a long silken night robe. He reached out, then parted the robe and fondled her breasts. She did not resist or indeed make any response, and then he slipped the robe off her shoulders, and she stood naked in front of him. He clutched her in his arms, kissing her face, her neck, and her shoulders. She trembled and sighed and then pleaded with him, “Not here. Please, not here.”

  “I must have you.”

  “I know. I know. But not here, not tonight.”

  “I must!”

  “Tomorrow. Please,” her voice quite terror-stricken.

  He let go of her and stepped back, and she stood there naked, with her arms crossed over her breasts. Then he picked up her robe and placed it over her shoulders, feeling suddenly empty and deflated.

  “Oh, God, I’m so sorry,” she whimpered. “But he’s awake. Don’t you understand? He’s still awake.”

  “Will he look for you?”

  “I don’t know. Call for me tomorrow. To look at one of the warships. He won’t mind that.”

  “What time?”

  “When you please. I’ll wait. I must go. Give me a few minutes.” And with that, she fled from the arbor.

  There was a bench in the arbor, and Clinton sat there for perhaps ten minutes. Then, as he slipped away through the garden, a dog began to bark, and he found himself half-running. He rounded a corner and, panting, slowed to a walk. The dog came after him, a large brown mongrel beast, snapping at his heels. Clinton ignored the animal, and presently the dog gave up the game and turned away. Clinton walked on, trying to compose the events of the following day in his mind, recalling that Howe had ordered a review of the grenadiers for the fourteenth of June, trying to remember what time the event was scheduled so that he could think of some excuse that would allow him to be elsewhere.

  On the other hand, why not invite her to the review—unless that would bring her husband along with her. The old man was quite a fire-eater. As this and that plan went through his mind, he found himself losing interest. It had been a full day; he would think about it tomorrow. He recalled the feel of her nak
ed body, her lips, her breasts, and slowly a feeling of satisfaction replaced his sense of loutishness and loss.

  The two guards at the door of the house where he was quartered regarded him without curiosity. They were well trained. Had he come in with Mrs. Hallsbury upon his arm, they would have been equally graven and silent.

  Slowly, he climbed the stairs to his rooms. It had been a long day, and he was, after all, forty-five years old. His sitting room was empty. O’Brian should have been waiting there with warm water and freshly done nightclothes, and his first impulse was to fling open the door and roar out the bastard’s name. Then he realized that the house was asleep. Burgoyne and their aides would not bless him for awakening them at this hour, unless, of course, they were still away, bedded down in the arms of less fettered Boston ladies.

  His eyes drifted around the room. The candles had been lit no more than an hour before, so O’Brian must have been there and then given up like the lazy bastard he was. He wondered whether Mrs. Hallsbury’s sitting room had this same restrained elegance that one found among the upper classes in the colonies: the hand-blocked wallpaper, the simple yet lovely wing chairs that flanked the fireplace, the oriental rugs, the plain yet beautiful silver that they wrought so well in America—all of it carefully protected by Sir William’s mania against looting. At least that—and beyond her sitting room, what? Would she be in bed with the old man now, warming his cold, ecclesiastical bones?

  He sighed and went into his bedroom, pulled off his boots, and began to strip himself of his uniform. He was naked except for his singlet when he heard the door to his sitting room open and then a light knock on his bedroom door.

  “Come in, you wretch,” he said, thinking that it was O’Brian.

  It was Mary O’Brian who opened the door and entered, a pitcher of warm water in one hand and his freshly laundered nightdress over her arm. She had washed her hair and set it up high on her head, and she was clad in a long linen robe that fell to her ankles yet revealed the curves of her full, womanly figure. There was just the slightest smile upon her lips, and as earlier in the day, she accepted his nakedness matter-of-factly. She laid the nightdress upon the bed, poured water into the hand basin, and then dipped a towel into the water and squeezed it out.