Liberty 1784: The Second War for Independence (15 page)

Sarah smiled and kissed him gently on the cheek. “Very much so, Will Drake.”

* * *

From Fort Washington to Detroit was about three hundred miles. A lean and strong woodsman could stride out at four miles per hour for ten hours a day, which meant that he could make the trip in less than two grueling weeks.

Unfortunately, Will was still not in as good a shape as he once had been, and the route taken was not a straight line conducive to quick journeys. It took him several days to even begin to be able to sustain the long, loping stride of a true woodsman. Then he forced himself and the others to make up lost time. Their goal was the farm of a man named Jean Leduc.

Leduc’s farm stood directly across the river from Detroit. Like others, he owned a strip of the riverfront where he docked a small boat and a canoe. His actual farmland ran in a narrow band inland and well into the woods. From his cabin and barn, anyone could see much of what was going on across the river in Detroit, half a mile away.

Jean Leduc was a small, thin man about fifty. His hair was wild and scraggly and his eyes burned with hatred for the British. They had killed his brother on the Plains of Abraham in 1757 and wounded Jean in the same battle, which caused him to walk with a limp.

His left hand was mangled. He’d been briefly captured by Joseph Brant’s Iroquois, and a squaw had happily chewed parts of it off while he screamed in agony. This had greatly amused the Iroquois braves.

Leduc had no great love for the upstart Americans, either, but decided that anyone who wanted to kill British soldiers was the lesser of evils. At least the Americans alleged to tolerate Catholics, while the British often persecuted them. He had to admit, however, that the British had left his coreligionists in Quebec pretty much alone.

When Will arrived at the farm, he made sure he did so after crossing the river at night and downstream from the British fort and town. There were few people around, but why advertise his presence until and if it became necessary.

Leduc greeted him without much warmth and made him get into a barn where he waited with a surprised Owen Wells.

“Is this our prison, Owen?”

“No sir,” Wells grinned. “It’s just Leduc’s way of showing us this is his place and he’s in charge. It also means he’ll help us but he doesn’t love us. Although he doesn’t want too much attention drawn to us, he’s not really worried.”

And that was the beauty of the operation. As a semi-cripple, Leduc was always hiring men to help work his farm. Thus, the presence of one, two, or even three men was not unusual. Nor was it strange that they were generally transients who never stayed long. Leduc had a reputation as a bad-tempered Frenchman and a selfish bastard who frequently tried to cheat his help out of their wages.

They went to the barn’s second floor loft and looked out across the river onto Detroit. A number of distant buildings had lamps or candles glowing faintly through the night. They were close enough to see people walking around, and the superb Royal Navy telescope given him by Tallmadge brought them into even more detail. Outside the fort, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of campfires twinkled and flickered and showed the dim shapes of a multitude of white tents. It was an impressive display of British might. More than a score of flatboats or barges were arrayed along the riverside and others were under construction.

Wells said. “It’s even better in the day, Major. There will be thousands of Redcoats marching around.”

“It’s amazing we’re safe here.”

“Oh, I think they know someone’s watching them, it’s just that they don’t think there’s much we can do, regardless of what we see, and then there’s the fact that his lordship, Bloody Tarleton, doesn’t want to piss off General Haldimand in Quebec by coming over to this side and roughing up the farmers.”

Prior to the colonist’s revolution, frontier areas like Detroit had fallen under the jurisdiction of the British governor in Quebec. After the war, the boundaries had been redrawn so that anything south of the Great Lakes fell under Cornwallis in New York. Therefore, the land across the river from Detroit was considered part of Quebec-controlled Canadian territory. Haldimand, no admirer of either Tarleton or Burgoyne, had let it be known that no British soldiers other than his would be permitted to operate on the Canadian side of the river. So far, Tarleton had been cowed by Haldimand and it was presumed that Burgoyne would obey the rules as well.

“Tarleton and Haldimand,” Owen said, “It sounds like a theatrical group.”

“And a bad one at that,” said Will. “By the way, my men are camped with yours.”

Neither man had arrived alone in the area, but had shown up alone at the Leduc farm. Another ten men awaited their return a few miles into the woods. They were near a tavern owned by men Tallmadge said were sympathizers to the American cause.

“Sir, did you see Faith?”

Will couldn’t stifle a grin. “I did, and she said to tell you she misses you and wants you to come back as soon as possible.”

“Would it be all right if I left right now?”

Will laughed and punched him lightly on the arm. “It would not. Now tell me, what will farmer Leduc have us do tomorrow?”

“We will work in his fields and take frequent breaks just like the shiftless bastards he usually hires. This will enable us to observe the comings and goings as best we can from over here.”

Will thought of Tallmadge’s request for information and still more information. “Any chance of our actually getting into Detroit?”

Now it was Owen’s turn to smile. “He and I have been talking about it. He does cross the river on occasion and likes the thought of insolently parading American soldiers inside a British fort.”

Will yawned. The rigors of the journey were catching up to him. “I like the idea, too. However, I think we should get some sleep if we’re going to have to pretend we’re farmers.”

* * *

“The girl takes nourishment, but doesn’t speak,” Sarah said and Franklin nodded thoughtfully. She ran her hand through the wispy hair on the Winifred’s bandaged head. Sarah and Abigail had cut it extremely short to make it easier to treat her cuts and burns, and it made her look even more skeletal then she was.

Sarah continued. “She takes broth and even mushy solids and seems to be gaining strength. Her bruises are going away and the cut on her head is healing. Sometimes her eyes open and she seems to be looking at me, but then she closes them and goes back to sleep. I worry that we may be losing her.”

Franklin reached down and took Winifred Haskill’s small hand in his. He marveled at the fact that it was colder and frailer than his. “When you are sick, doesn’t it feel better when you awaken after a good, long sleep?”

“Of course. Are you saying that this deep sleep is a natural way for the body to heal itself?”

“Not the body, Sarah. More likely it is the mind that is trying to heal itself, perhaps even the soul, if there is such a thing. We know so little about healing the body, as you’ve learned from Doctor Young, and we know so much less of the problems of the mind and the soul. We are total illiterates in those areas.”

“I didn’t know you believed in a soul, Doctor Franklin.”

“Some days, my dear Sarah, I don’t know what I believe. While I certainly believe in a supreme being, I have no idea what shape or form it takes, or what interest it might have in our activities. For instance, does a god really care if young Mistress Haskill lives or dies?”

Sarah nodded. “Perhaps he doesn’t care if anyone lives or dies. Perhaps god just permits things to happen, which would explain such things as war and plague.”

Franklin smiled. She was so very smart. “Perhaps someday you will have the honor of talking to Thomas Jefferson. He is a very complex man with equally complex beliefs.”

He sighed and continued. “In the meantime we shall concern ourselves with Mistress Haskill. I’ve spoken to some of the men who found her and they say that the place where she lived was a place of absolute and bloody devastation.”

“I know. I spoke to some of them as well.”

“Our soldiers think she escaped from the bodies of her family while the fire was just beginning and crawled her way into a cellar before she either suffocated or burned to death. Perhaps the pain of the flames even awakened her. They found a tunnel leading from the cellar to the woods. It must have been put there to provide for just such a need to escape, either from fire, or storm, or the depraved animals that call themselves men, and that is how she made her way to the forest where she was found. It’s no wonder to me that she stopped speaking after giving her name. Perhaps she gave it so that we would have something to put on her gravestone.”

Sarah shuddered at the thought. “But will she get better?”

“Only she knows,” Franklin replied softly. “And right now she isn’t telling. Some people say I’m a great and intelligent man, but situations like this make me realize just how ignorant I am.”

“Does she even know that we won’t harm her?”

“Have you told her that, Sarah?”

Sarah nodded. “I hold her hand and whisper to her. I say her name and keep saying that she’s safe. Sometimes she seems to moan. Mistress Adams does it as well, and sometimes Mistress Greene takes a turn even though it means leaving her ill husband. We try not to leave her alone too much in case she should awaken and be frightened at being in such a strange place, but we do have other things to do.”

“Then keep doing it as much as you can. No possible harm can come to her. And if she should awaken and be frightened, then we shall have to deal with it.”

Franklin left the room. Sarah sat on a stool beside Winifred, took her hand, and talked to her. She told her that she was safe and free. She told her how beautiful the outside world looked, even though the new-fallen snow had done little more than cover the mud. Sarah told her a little gossip, such as how Faith was moping for a soldier who had gone away. She thought it was good to include mentions of family and the gossip of Fort Washington as a dose of the new reality.

At length, Sarah tired. She went to leave Winifred and catch up on her neglected clerical duties. On impulse, she turned and saw Winifred Haskill’s eyes wide open and watching her. Sarah moved to the stool and sat down. The two looked at each other. Sarah felt like she was being measured, assessed.

“Will you remain with us, Winifred Haskill? Or will you go back to the dark place where you’ve been?”

The corners of the girl’s mouth flickered in what might have been the beginnings of a smile. “Yes,” she whispered. “I think I’ll stay for a bit.”

* * *

Leduc was amenable to the idea of taking them across the river, even though there was ice drifting downstream. “Mostly mush,” he said disparagingly. “Try not to fall in, though. The cold’ll grab your nuts in an icy grip and you’ll die in just a few minutes.”

“We’ll keep it in mind,” Will said, unable to stop his hand from moving to his groin.

Still, Leduc wanted them to wait a couple of days before crossing. He said he wanted their presence to be noted as normal around the farm. Will also suspected that the old bastard wanted some work done before the two men gathered their information and departed.

When they finally did cross, they took a rowboat to push through the ice rather than a more fragile canoe, and Leduc, for once grinning happily, let Will and Owen do all the work. It was proper, he said, since they were supposed to be his hired hands.

“We are going into the belly of the beast,” said Owen.

Will thought much the same thing, although the beast seemed almighty disinterested in their coming. No one glanced more than casually at them, and only a couple of men waved at Leduc, whose presence in and around Detroit was clearly considered normal.

Will tried to take in the area with a soldier’s eye even though he knew it was extremely unlikely they’d ever attack the place. The ground was flat to gently rolling, and the area had been largely denuded of trees. These had gone to build small but sturdy Fort Lernoult. More wood had gone to make the flimsy stockade that surrounded the town, and the town itself, as well as for use as firewood. Farms had sprung up on the Detroit side and sent thin fingers of cultivated land inland, like Leduc’s on the other side of the Detroit River. Will noted that a large number of buildings and homes had been built outside the fort. Apparently, there was no longer any threat from Indians, which was interesting since Pontiac’s uprising and subsequent siege of Detroit had taken place only a couple of decades earlier. Of course, the presence of the British Army had a lot to do with that sense of security.

As they walked towards the town’s wooden wall, Will found it a cause of wonderment that British soldiers walked by and past them without apparently noticing them.

“Arrogant bastards, aren’t they,” whispered Leduc. “I’d like to slice their fucking throats.”

They entered the town of Detroit with only a nod to the guards. Leduc explained that the guards around Lernoult and the town proper belonged to the regular garrison of fewer than a hundred men and he knew most of them by sight. A transplanted Dutchman, Colonel Arent de Peyster, commanded them. The garrison troops hated the new arrivals since they clogged the taverns and chased what few women there were. The regular garrison couldn’t wait for Burgoyne’s army to depart so they could get back to their comfortable existence.

“What kind of man is this de Peyster?” Will asked.

“He’s fairly decent. He won’t hang you unless it’s absolutely necessary.” He laughed when he saw the look on Will’s face. “No, he’s quite genial and tolerant for an British officer. He took over from Richard Lernoult who built the citadel, and is a far, far better man than Henry Hamilton, the lieutenant governor who was known as the ‘hairbuyer’ because he delighted in buying the scalps of rebels. He didn’t much care if the scalps came from women or children.”

“Still, we will have to watch out for de Peyster’s men,” Will said. “They will likely be able to recognize most of the locals and might wonder where we came from.”

“We will indeed,” he said and pointed to a close by wooden building. “But now we will go to this store that has a barn. It’s where we will buy feed and supplies that I don’t need,” Leduc said. “That will be my excuse for being here in case I should happen to need one. There is a loft above the barn where you can go and observe.”