Valley Forge (13 page)

His mind was racing. In killing a father and son, he had solved an immediate problem but, in doing so, had created others. Since they came from the village, they would be missed and, in time, someone would come out looking for them. It was vital for Skoyles and his party to get as far away as possible, but they could not do that until they were reunited. He was now panting for breath and blundering about in the half-dark. Skoyles paused for a brief rest and wondered if he should risk yelling out to his friends. It then occurred to him that the two men who had tried to waylay him might not have been on their own. They might have brought someone with them. He was still pondering when he heard a distant cry of pain, a yell of agony that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. It had sounded like a man's voice. He was afraid that it might have belonged to Tom Caffrey.

At least, he had a rough idea of the direction in which to go. The cry had come from well over to his left, so he changed the angle of his walk and strode
on. In the denser part of the woodland, light had all but disappeared, and Skoyles had to feel his way gingerly forward. Questions buzzed in his brain like a swarm of insects. Who had yelled out and why had he done so? What had happened to his friends? How far away were they, and in what state would he find them? Why had the men from the village followed them in the first place? Skoyles was utterly bewildered.

Where
was
he?

Alert to every tiny sound, he trudged on with growing disquiet. Of all his many anxieties, the greatest was that some harm had befallen Elizabeth Rainham. In agreeing to let her escape with him, he had taken on a huge responsibility, yet he could hardly have left her in Cambridge. Apart from anything else, she would have been vulnerable to the attentions of Major Featherstone. He and Elizabeth were pledged to each other. Skoyles had simply had to rescue her, but, in doing so, he had given himself an additional problem. Elizabeth, like Polly Bragg, was not able to defend herself properly. Instead of devoting all their energies to their own escape, Skoyles and Caffrey had to act as protectors of the two women. It was a severe handicap.

Skoyles felt an upsurge of guilt. Should he have left the others and plunged off into the wood? Was he exposing them to attack by doing so? Had the two men he killed simply been acting as decoys to get him away from the others so that they could be more easily overpowered? It was a thought that preyed on his conscience as he groped his way along. Having survived the storm in the Atlantic, had they now foundered on land? Were the others now captives? If that were the case, he had failed them badly. His remorse deepened.

Desperate to hurry, he was compelled to take his time, using the barrel of his musket yet again to push back any bushes that got in his way. Eventually, he stumbled out onto what seemed to be the track that he and the others had been traveling along. Skoyles was in a dilemma. Which way should he go? Was he behind or ahead of them? Taking a chance, he swung right, but he soon realized his mistake when he encountered a large boulder beside the track. He had certainly not passed it before. That meant the others must be behind him, in the direction of the village.

Finding himself on a wide track, albeit covered in a thin layer of snow, he was able to jog along at a steady pace. He had left the others beside a pine tree in a clearing. In the darkness, however, every clearing looked the same. He wondered how he would find the one where they were waiting—if, indeed,
that was what they actually were doing. They might have been apprehended and spirited away elsewhere. Or they might even have gone looking for him. Skoyles had been away from them for some time, and they would have heard the four shots in the woodland. If they believed he had been killed, the most natural thing would have been to search for his body. Is that what they had done?

He had gone almost a quarter of a mile when he came to another clearing with a stand of pine trees around it. Skoyles was certain that this was the place. They had come up a gradient to reach that point and he could just make out the hill, starting to go downward. Yet there was nobody about. If they were nearby, they must have heard his approach. Skoyles cupped his hands to his mouth.

"Tom!" he called. "Are you there?"

His voice rang out, but there was no reply. He shouted louder.

"Elizabeth! Polly! Where are you?"

There was still no response. He walked across the clearing to the far side and stared into the gloom. Among the trees, it was almost pitch dark. He went a few more yards, then accepted that it was a hopeless exercise. His friends would never be found in the black interior of the woodland. Skoyles was about to return to the clearing when his foot touched something solid. It jerked along the ground. He was so startled that he backed away and raised his musket, thinking it might be a snake or a small animal of some sort. When he bent down and looked more closely, however, he was given another shock. Protruding from the bushes was a pair of feet.

Valley Forge lay at the junction of the Schuylkill River and Valley Creek, over twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia. It was a tiny farming community, consisting of a few houses and a forge that the British army had wrecked two months earlier. George Washington, commander in chief of the Continental Army, had chosen the two-mile-long site because it was protected by the creek itself and by a peak called Mount Joy. The sloping hill was also selected because it was thickly wooded, thus providing the timber with which the troops began to build their log town.

Even in the gloom of early evening, axes could still be heard at work. Washington strolled along between the rows of cabins that were beginning to
grow up in serried ranks. His companion, Major John Clark Jr., was not sanguine about the operation.

"We have nothing like the number of axes and saws needed," he said. "We'll never be able to accommodate twelve thousand men."

"We must, Major. I want them under cover before the first snow."

"Then we need Congress to supply better equipment."

"I write to them daily," said Washington wearily, "but in vain. Frankly, I am less worried about housing the men than about feeding them. The British camped here first and plundered much of the stock in the surrounding area."

"Then we'll have to search further afield."

"Even then, our needs are not answered. Farmers would prefer to sell their produce in Philadelphia, where they can get paid in coin. All that we can offer them is printed money, and they distrust it completely."

"They should be
forced
to sell to us," argued Clark. "If they supply the British, they are conspiring with the enemy."

Washington nodded. He broke off to watch two men lifting another length of timber into place on their future home. Divided into groups of twelve, the soldiers were building cabins to an identical specification. They had to be sixteen feet long, fourteen feet wide, and have walls that were six and a half feet high. Three bunks, one above the other, were to be built in each corner. Roofs were made of saplings covered with earth and straw. Doors were constructed from split slabs, and windows were made of whatever could be found. Gaps between the logs were daubed with handfuls of clay.

Major Clark was impressed with the men's readiness to work on by the light of fires. He was a handsome man with a suppressed energy about him. A former aide to General Nathanael Greene, he had been chosen as the army's head of intelligence, having already gained valuable experience of espionage in the New Jersey campaign. Washington was convinced that he had made a good appointment.

"It was a clever idea to offer rewards for the best cabins," said Clark. "Competition always makes men work harder."

"True, Major. It also helps them take a pride in their work. Some of the cabins will even have a stone chimney."

"If only the British had not destroyed the sawmill."

"You can hardly expect them to help us."

"They've made things so difficult for our army."

"Then you must make things difficult for them, Major," Washington told him. "War does not stop in wintertime. It continues by other means. We need to mislead and perplex the enemy."

"I've already set plans in motion to do that."

"Do you have enough men in Philadelphia?"

"Yes, General," replied Clark. "And women, of course. Never let us forget that it was Lydia Darragh who warned us about the British attack at Whitemarsh. We owe a huge debt to Mrs. Darragh. And the beauty of it is that the British would never suspect her of being a spy because she is a devout Quaker. The Friends are supposed to refrain from war."

"Mrs. Darragh is an exception to the rule," observed Washington, drily, "and so is her son. Lieutenant Charles Darragh has given us good service. Be sure to tell her that when you next visit Philadelphia."

"I will, General."

"And pay a call on someone I have just planted in the city."

"Who might that be?"

"Ezekiel Proudfoot."

"The silversmith?"

"Yes, Major," said Washington. "He's a sound man. I have every expectation that he will turn out to be one of our most potent weapons."

Working by candlelight, Ezekiel Proudfoot was hunched over the table in the room at the King George Tavern. He had drawn several versions of the cartoon before he completed one that satisfied him. Proudfoot sat back to study it. Then he reached for the piece of paper on which he had written the words of the song he had heard earlier. Choosing one part of the refrain, he added it to his sketch by way of a caption.

His initial fear was unfounded. The dead man was not Tom Caffrey. When he pulled the corpse out of the bushes, Jamie Skoyles felt a gush of relief coursing through him. The man was a stranger, lying on his back after being stabbed through the heart. Blood made his coat sticky to the touch and Skoyles had to wipe his fingers clean in the grass. Whoever had killed him had not taken the man's musket. Still loaded, it lay in the bushes beside him.

Skoyles decided to get away from the place at once. After taking the opportunity of stealing the man's powder and ammunition, he set off back up the track. There was no telling if Caffrey and the others were in any way involved in the man's death, but one thing was certain. They would not have headed back toward the village they had passed earlier. They would have pressed on in the opposite direction.

Breaking into a trot again, Skoyles hoped that no more than three men had come in pursuit of them. He was sure that the earlier trio had been working together, and that he had been deliberately lured away from his friends. Since two of the men had tried to kill him in the wood, it was obvious that they were not there to capture what they thought were fugitives from the British army. They were common thieves, bent on shooting their prey before taking their horse and their valuables. It was an open question as to whether the women would have been spared.

Time was impossible to calculate accurately, but Skoyles reckoned that it was at least half an hour since he left the others in the clearing, perhaps even longer. They could be anywhere. He could not believe that they would have deserted him without a very good reason. All that he could do was to keep going forward in the hope that he would eventually catch up with them, assuming that they had actually continued along the track. Had they struck off at some point, then there was absolutely no possibility of finding them in the dark.

There was one small bonus. Apart from his musket, he had nothing else to carry. Unencumbered by a knapsack or any luggage, he could maintain a reasonable pace. It was getting colder. A stiff breeze started to blow in his face. Every so often, he would stop, listen intently, then call out. The only answer he ever got was the muffled cry of an animal. It served to remind him how dangerous it was to stay out after dark. The woods were full of predatory creatures.

Skoyles refused to believe that his friends had been killed. No shots had been fired apart from those exchanged with his two victims. The stabbed man in the clearing could hardly have accounted for the death of three people when he had not even discharged his musket. They had to be ahead of Skoyles somewhere. It was only a question catching up with them. After a mile or more, his hopes began to fade. Tom Caffrey and the two women seemed to have disappeared completely. Coming to a halt, Skoyles tried a last, desperate shout, but it did not reach the ears of his friends. He began to lose heart.

Before he could set off again, however, he heard a distant sound. It took him a few moments to make out what it was. A horse was coming toward him, moving at a brisk trot along the track. Skoyles wondered if it belonged to a confederate of the other men. If that was the case, the rider had to be waylaid and questioned. He might know what had happened to Skoyles's friends. As the clip-clop of the hooves came closer, Skoyles bided his time, choosing a point where the track narrowed and concealing himself behind a tree.

When the rider got close enough, Skoyles leapt out from his hiding place and pointed his musket, barking an order at the same time.

"Stop there—or I'll shoot!"

The horse was brought to an abrupt halt and slithered in the snow.

"Put that bloody thing down, Jamie!" said a voice. "It's me."

Sergeant Tom Caffrey let out a peal of laughter.

"It's good," he said, scrutinizing it. "It's very good, Mr. Allen. Thank you."

"Will you be able to use it?"

"Naturally."

"Then I'll do an engraving of it," said Proudfoot, looking over his shoulder at the drawing. "I'm not sure how accurate a portrait it is of General Howe because I've never actually seen him, but I've tried to make it clear who the man in bed with Mrs. Loring is."

"Well, it's certainly not her husband, I can vouch for that."

They were in the bookshop and Pearsall Hughes was taking a first look at the cartoon that Ezekiel Proudfoot had drawn. It showed a bloated British general, still in uniform, caressing a half-naked woman of ample dimensions, who had a hand down the front of his breeches. In the balloon that sprouted from his mouth were the words "In your hand freedom's scepter you bear, Mrs. Loring." Around the bed was a series of British soldiers, gambling, drinking, brawling, or molesting women, a scene of corruption that would have been revolting had it not been so comically drawn. The caption was below:
Conquest buckles his sword
.