Infernal Revolutions (14 page)

‘Now shut it,' said Sergeant Mycock.

‘By the deep twelve!'

‘Five points to port, Sir!'

‘Steady as she goes there, Mr Knowles.'

Navigational shouts rent the air as the
Twinkle
edged into the forest of English oakwood that was New York harbour. Ordered to be silent while the delicate manoeuvres took place, the men watching from the decks nevertheless whispered to each other excitedly.

‘Just look at that land, will yer, Isaiah. Gaw, how I'd like to sow a few seeds in there.'

‘Carrots, George. Thousands of pounds of carrots. Big ‘uns too, they'd be, I'd wager.'

‘No, barley is the only crop for that sort of soil.'

As a cultivated townsman, who had never had his hands in the good mother earth his entire life, and had no intention of ever doing so until I was lowered in it dead, I registered these remarks with amused detachment. Here they were, the peasants, three thousand miles from home, on the edge of a spanking new continent all romantic and free, and all they could think about was planting vegetables and crops on the first bit of land they clapped eyes on. Lucky for them Mr Axelrod was on another ship.

But at least their thoughts, if parochial, were wholesome, unlike those of the foaming quartet of drunken Hessians pushing against the taffrail, who were unable to conceal their impatience to get ashore and start planting seed of another kind. As their sergeants struggled to control them, the soldiers cheered and waved their rum bottles over their heads, linking arms round each others' shoulders and singing brutalsounding Teutonic songs that seemed, if pure vocables of sound were anything to go on, to involve much shoving and pushing and ripping. They had as much charm as bull terriers, and made even French popinjays preferable as drinking companions. What on earth did they feed them in the dark cities of Cologne, Hanover, Munich and Frankfurt? Dr Werner never told me. The inevitable delays in getting ashore, made worse in this case by the protracted diplomatic negotiations that were apparently going on between the British and Rebel leaders, only served to whip up the Hessians' frenzy even more. As they angrily threw their empty bottles into the sea, they grasped the taffrail and started shaking it with all their might. ‘Schon Land. Bew-tee-full Fucken Mädchen.' It took a hail of whips and musket butts administered by their officers to silence them.

I too was mightily pleased with the look of the place, though not for the same reasons as the farmers and the Germans. ‘Twas the refreshing aura of space and bigness that captured my fancy; indeed, never before had I seen such a noble prospect as this. Amongst the woods of Manhattan Island I could make out a fort, several churches, many notable mansions, and a fine set of commodious quays and warehouses. To the east lay the green pastureland of Long Island, while to the west lay Staten Island, dotted with big, fat, colourful Dutch barns and farmhouses. Under the sparkling sun, wrapped in the invigorating scent of pine, the whole scene exuded health and prosperity. Indeed, ‘twas incomprehensible why anyone should want to rebel in so idyllic a place, and thus attract the envious eyes of loutish soldiers, most of whom were dissatisfied with their lot back home; but no doubt I would find out sooner or later, things never being what they seemed at first sight.

Whilst waiting to disembark, we learnt to our relief that most of the initial dirty work in the area had been done for us. (‘Good,' beamed Thomas Pomeroy upon hearing the news, ‘Splendid'.) The army, consisting mainly of crude Hessians in these attacks, had routed the rebels at Long Island on 27th August. Then they had crossed to Manhattan Island and almost trapped George Washington and his troops there in what would surely have been another rout, had the rebels not escaped north to a place called Harlem Heights.

‘It's a rout,' was Dick Lickley's considered opinion.

‘It's a rout, wife,' said Thomas Pomeroy to his gloomladen wife. ‘If we keep on routing at this rate we'll be home by Christmas.'

His wife looked up at him with a clear trusting look in her eyes. His son regarded him steadily from under his tricorne, as though wondering what a rout was.

‘Yes, wife, I really think we will.'

Thomas, accustomed to appropriating the future, had decided that this would happen, and began to make contingency plans for his family's departure.

The rest of us, less adept at such thought dislocation, made simple plans for a simple campaign in the present, and talked of martial things.

‘What do you think it feels like to be shot, Harry?' asked Dick, resting from his strenuous attempts to knock down a screeching gull with a well-aimed piece of hardtack.

‘I imagine if it doesn't kill you outright, or knock you unconscious, there's a numbness at the point the shot enters, followed several seconds or perhaps minutes later by the most agonizing, burning, aching sensation. Just like being knifed in fact.'

Dick took aim and let loose another piece, which clonked the gull on the head without effect.

‘It's nothing like that.'

‘What's it like then?'

‘Nothing like that.'

Only Dick Lickley knew what everything in the world felt like, looked like, smelled like, sounded like and tasted like, but he was not good at communicating this knowledge. Usually this superciliousness exasperated me to the point of frenzy, and he knew it, but this morning, my mind expanded under the beneficent rays of natural beauty, ‘twas a rich source of soft laughter. As were the subsequent reflections on life and death that were initiated.

‘Look,' he went on, ‘the chances of us emerging unscathed from this bloody war are minute. If we're lucky we'll get our heads ripped off by a ball and die quicker than you can say Sam Johnson. If we're not, we'll end up blind, or crippled, or – worst of all – having our limbs sawn off by some bloody butcher of a surgeon, screaming in agony, only to die anyway of shock or bloody gangrene; so ‘twill have been pointless enduring the pain in the first place. I therefore suggest that ‘tis our human duty, until that day, to savour every minute of life available to us. Sniff the flowers, admire the scenery, marvel at the new sights this continent has to offer; in short, to relish everything that nature throws at us.'

‘Aye, and shag women,' someone cheered.

‘Aye,' came up a mass male choir, ‘shag women!'

Even the noisome vapours of the docks – which hit us when we eventually disembarked in a flotilla of jolly boats, yawls and barges – could not diminish the holiday mood of the occasion. It sustained us through a day's unloading, and was still present when we bedded down at night in our first American barracks, Trinity Church on Broadway. There, as we tossed and turned in the pews, various volunteers took it in turns to entertain the captive audience with improvised masques, burlesques, harlequinades and impersonations. Eventually, despite the increasing catcalls, a distinctly unsteady-looking Dick appeared in the candlelit pulpit to perform a turn.

‘Give us a song,' someone called from the back, ‘or fuck off.'

‘A pleasure,' Dick slurred, reaching down behind the pulpit and bringing up a pewter pot of beer, which he swigged from lustily, froth piling up on his top lip. Then he tossed the pot yobbishly into the audience to great cheers, gripped the lectern firmly for greater support, then opened his mouth like a little thrush.

Out came, to the surprise of everyone, a fine tenor voice and the distinctly secular song
Gloria, I Cannot Love You More
.

It was a song of subtle insight into the realities of desires, albeit lost on a regiment of sexstarved soldiers, who, if the subsequent growling was anything to go on, could not comprehend the lyrics past the first line.

‘All right, that's enough,' croaked a voice that was vaguely familiar. ‘Please, Dick, this is a church, a house of God, and not the place for either profanity or beer.'

This was Parson Blood, who'd just come in off the street with an armful of Bibles, Common Prayers and Religious Tracts. He peered apprehensively over the top of his stack, bracing himself for a deluge of abuse.

‘As you say, Parson,' replied Dick unexpectedly. ‘I'm buggered anyway.' He clattered down from his position and shuffled into his reserved spot in the front pew, where he stretched himself out, drew a blanket over himself, and fell sound asleep, a thrilling example to the insomniacs amongst us.

Parson Blood, emboldened by this show of obedience, carefully laid down his books on the altar and climbed into the pulpit himself. He looked even more haggard than usual, and appeared to be suffering from a bad cold. Ignoring the odd call to
give it a rest
he composed himself as best he could, loosened a few lumps of phlegm in his throat, blew his nose, and then, looking eerily like a deathshead in the flickering candlelight, launched into his speech.

‘This is the first time I have had the opportunity to address you as regimental chaplain from, as it were, my proper position. I have had several informal chats with you on a one-to-one basis, or in small groups, but useful though those contacts were, I feel I would not be doing my job properly unless I addressed all of you in the manner of a shepherd tending his flock.'

Vigorous bleating inevitably arose.

‘Please, please. Do not deride my every word. I talk of matters affecting your souls, and these are times when, let us face it, Death cannot be very far away. ‘Tis a foolhardy and dangerous thing to mock representatives of the Lord.'

‘You're no representative of anyone, let alone the Lord,' came a bold Irish voice, ‘and ‘tis blasphemous of you to claim such a distinction. You're a weak and meek man, of neither use nor ornament, addicted to sherry and the soft life, like most of your kind. I bet you won't be tending your flock when the fighting starts.'

The Irishman had obviously articulated the feelings of the whole battalion, for suddenly the church was in uproar. Cries of
Too Bloody Right!
and
Hang Him!
echoed round the New Yorkers' Holy of Holies. I poked my head up and peeked over the top of the pew to see a flurry of waving fists and ugly contorted faces. I was astonished that anyone could get so worked up about religion, until I was told that some of these men were veterans of the fighting down in Charleston, just shipped in, and it was probably less an affront to their religious faith, supposing they had any, than the thought that Parson Blood was a shirker that affected them so. I looked back at Parson Blood and watched him visibly flinching under the waves of hatred; and though I reacted badly to religion myself, I sympathized deeply. He had, after all, volunteered to come with the army to America, and I knew what a good man he was, but without the mighty speaking voice and dramatic style of a George Whitefield or an Edmund Burke, or someone of that ilk, he had no hope of reaching men like these
en masse
. His cause was a Lost One, and I watched in embarrassment and sorrow as Parson Blood climbed down from the lectern and slunk abjectly away, his important sermon undelivered. Resolving there and then never to venture to speak in public myself, I brought my head back down below the parapet, pulled my blanket over me, and waited for silence and sleep to descend.

But it took more than a whole day of exhausting physical work to subdue the most committed insomniac in the British Army, and I was still waiting at dawn, alone in a sea of gently heaving flesh which snored, whistled and snorted like a horse. I looked around at my sleeping comrades and wondered why they could relax and I could not. Unable to answer, I clasped my hands behind my head and looked up at the ceiling of the church, murky and cavernous in the wan moonlight. Like the lights of passing flambeaux that occasionally flickered through the windows, stray thoughts and memories of my old life darted through my mind in a most hellish farrago, so that I was glad for the odd diversion when it came. At various intervals throughout the night, with varying degrees of clarity, I heard in the streets a skirl of bagpipes; an argument of some sort between tough Scottish and Irish voices; the odd boom of a cannon out in the bay; a subdued muffled drumbeat (which instantly had me sweating); and a strange scraping sound, as of a giant slab of iron being dragged along a cobbled street. More disturbing than diverting were what sounded like the distant cries of the Damned in Hell, though as these sounds were right on the edge of my hearing, I dismissed them hopefully as sleepstarved Fantasy.

As the dismal light of dawn began to shade the ceiling, it belatedly occurred to me that I had heard no bells ringing the hour – which struck me as strange considering how many church steeples I had seen from the
Twinkle
. Had the officers, in rare consideration of our need for sleep, had them removed? Then I remembered someone telling me that the Rebels had melted down all the bells into cannons. This in turn reminded me of the reason for my being here – to be shot at and killed by damned Liberty Lovers, some of whom, no doubt, were lying not two hundred yards from where I was now. This realization ended attempts at sleep once and for all, and, haggard though I was, I waited eagerly for Sergeant Mycock's rasping cockcrow to rouse us to arms. Night thoughts, once so eagerly hunted, had now turned around to hunt me.

Mercifully, I was back in the old comforting routine of drilling and marching not two hours later. This time, however, the drilling was carried out at a place called the Battery, at the southern tip of the island, and the marching was done in the streets around the city. At first, this change of scene gave our manoeuvres added zest, and I found myself goosestepping with great vigour as the Loyalist crowds cheered us on and threw flowers over us. And when the adulation waned, which it soon did, there was still the interest of the elegant streets themselves to occupy our darting eyes. There were the doors with big white R's chalked on them, signifying the homes of Rebels; there were the tempting dram shops; there were the smoking chop houses; there were beaver pelts and deerskins on sale in the markets; there was the plinth of the equestrian statue of George III on the Bowling Green (the statue itself having gone the same way as the churchbells); there were the demon barber shops; there was the source of the howling I had heard and would continue to hear at night, viz. Van Cortlandt's Sugar House, now operating as a Rebel prison; and last but not least there were the skulking Brother Jonathans themselves – the scurviest, most worthless jackanapes ‘twas possible to imagine, yet in their way gruesomely fascinating. Their clothes were plain, with a cut at least five years behind the latest Brighthelmstone style, while their speech, in the conversations I overheard, seemed about two hundred years out of date. It was clearly English, but with a sort of faint countrified growl, as if they were outcasts from the Forest of Arden.

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.