Washington and Caesar (25 page)

Caesar thought about that, about all the rules they lived with. Harding could give him orders, but he couldn’t smoke. That had some humor to it. Caesar looked at the locks of his pistols and changed the prime out of the little horn from his bag. He looked at the sky.

“I think we’re going to have rain,” he said.

The white boy nodded.

Jim came running back, his energy still a tangible thing.

“Four hundred fifty-five each way. Curves to the north. Nice even curve, I think.”

Harding took a note. Then he drew on his sketch. “Like that?”

“Yessuh.”

Caesar didn’t like the track. “I think it’s a plantation track to the beach for loading.”

“Let’s go find the plantation, then,” said Harding cheerfully, and they were off.

An hour later, their packs were feeling heavy and the rain was imminent. Indeed, the first cold drops had already fallen around them in spurts, as if the sky was indecisive. The track had crossed two fence lines, and they could see fields in the middle distance. Darkness was not far away.

“We need a camp.”

“We’re a long way from the beach,” said Caesar. “I had thought to camp on the beach, where the boat could see a signal.”

The two boys looked at him. “It’s a long way back,” said Jim.

“An hour.”

“We’ll be wet through by then.” Harding was less cocksure, now. He was tired. “And I want to see the plantation, get a sketch of the house. The governor will want to know. We’re here.”

“If we camp here, we’re a damn sight surer of gettin’ caught, suh.
Sir.”
Caesar tried to look for alternatives. Getting the boys back to the beach, building them a shelter, then coming back here? It seemed possible.

“We’ll make camp here.”

“No fire then,” said Caesar. Jim nodded. Harding seemed surprised when Jim joined Caesar and looked at him reproachfully. Caesar took both of them by the sleeve and
pulled them off the little track and into the shadow of some trees.

“We ah’ standin’ in the open. We
are standing
in the open.”

Jim looked at Harding apologetically. “We been hunted in ground like this. Smell of a fire carries a long way. Suh.”

Harding looked like he was going to be angry, then thought better of it. “You’re the scouts. I want to see that plantation. What do we do?”

“We go to the plantation, quick as we can. Then we go back to the beach to camp. That’s what’s safe.” Caesar was already looking at the ground between his stand of trees and the fields. “Don’t want none of the slaves there to see us.”

“Won’t they protect you?”

“Maybe. Maybe not, too. An’ if’n they see you, might be different.”

“I’m willing to take the risk, Mr. Caesar.”

Caesar stopped watching the fields and turned back to face Harding. The boy looked earnest.

“Mr. Harding, if’n you get took here, you’ll be a prisoner for a few weeks, kept in houses by folk. If’n Jim or me gets took, we’ll be hung up dead on the spot, or made slaves. I don’ wan’ you to think we’re afeared, but I wan’ you to know what you ah’ askin’ us to risk to take a look at that house.”

The rain began in earnest.

“I’ll go alone, then,” said the white boy. “I’m sorry. I had forgotten.”

“That’s wrong, too. Jim an’ me’ll go. You stay here and stay dry an’ keep our packs.”

“But you said…”

Jim sank down on his haunches next to Harding. “We’ good at this, suh. We’ll take a little peek an’ be back in no time.”

Harding looked miserable. “I’m in command. I should go.”

Caesar felt himself admiring the boy a little. “Good for you,” he said. “But you got to know we can do this bettuh…
better
than you.”

He didn’t wait to argue with the boy. The boy spoke quietly to Jim and handed him something. Jim nodded. He and Jim checked their pistols again and moved off across the ground, now wet. They walked up some dead ground to a creek bed, and then followed the creek bed through a few fields until Jim, crawling up the bank, could see the chimneys of a big house. Caesar worked his way farther along the bank and then came up himself.

The plantation was a fine one, although small. The main house was solid brick, with five large windows on the top floor front over four windows and an elegant entrance with a fanlight. Brick outbuildings stood to the right and left. Even in the gray of winter’s evening, the building had some warmth to it, and the lit windows glowed orange as if inviting cold men to come inside and be warmed.

Behind the warm house lay the slave quarters, two rows of dark huts. None of them had an orange glow to them. Without servants to keep fires going all day, the fires went out on cold afternoons, and the huts were always cold.

A proper road ran from the front of the house off to the north. A great stand of trees grew at the northern edge of the fields, which stretched for half a mile. Caesar nodded to himself. The plantation was too far inland to make a good headquarters, but it was too close to ignore. He understood that much. He crawled back to Jim and found Jim sketching the positions of the buildings. His heavy, clumsy strokes were very different from Harding’s, but his eye was sure and the heavy square of the house was proportionate to the two barns and rows of slave cabins.

Caesar pointed at the nearest shed, an openwork log barn with a shingle roof. “Tobacco barn,” he whispered.

Jim nodded.

Caesar mimed smoking. “Gonna steal some.”

Jim shook his head in exasperation.

“Mistuh Hardin’ is waiting for us. You jus’ tol’ him not to take risks.”

Caesar crawled over the top of the bank and began to run toward the barn. Jim went back to his drawing, but now he couldn’t do it. He was tense. He wanted to follow Caesar, but thought that only increased the risk. He could see slaves working in the fields just beyond the barn, and he could hear a white voice, probably an overseer, shouting in the middle distance.

Then he saw Caesar at the side of the barn, and then slipping into it, a dark shadow against the near dark of the barn. Then Caesar was out again, and running toward him, his legs pumping. Jim wondered at how fast he was. He’d never seen anyone run as fast as Caesar. In a moment, the man was over the edge of the bank and down beside him. The rain was coming faster. Caesar had two armfuls of tobacco leaf, dry and pungent, and the sweet, dry smell filled the air.

“You done drawing?”

“As good as I can get it.”

“I wan’ get this under my tarpaulin, an’ keep it dry.” Caesar had a fortune in tobacco, at least by the laws of economy on their ship.

The darkness covered their retreat. It was somehow shorter back to where they had left Harding than it had been sneaking out. Harding looked as if he hadn’t moved, and his relief at seeing them was so great that he laughed aloud. Caesar didn’t pause to greet him, but pulled out his oilcloth and wrapped his precious tobacco in it. Then he slung the whole package over his shoulder and stood up.

Jim was showing his sketch to Harding, but the dark and the rain made it impossible to judge or add Jim’s work to the map.

“Must we go back to the beach?”

“If you want a fire.” Caesar didn’t mention that he had piled firewood that morning, or left it in a dry place.

Harding nodded. His hat was collapsing in the rain, and the dye from his blue uniform jacket had run into his shirt. He was small and wet and cold, but he still had some indefinable air of command.

“Let’s go, then.”

It took them much less time to walk back down the trail, even in the dark and rain, than it had to walk up. Caesar had experienced this before, and knew that careful approaches in unfamiliar ground took much more time than a simple walk down a clear trail. They were all soaked through and shivering.

The tide was up when they came to the beach, and had come up high, so that the shingle was only a few yards wide at the top before the open woods began. Caesar had to hunt for his woodpile for a while, but he found it by stumbling over the slick old bark. Then he used the bark as a shield while he lit the fire under it. First he got a spark from his flint and steel on his charred cloth, all out of his fire kit and the driest thing he had. Then he used dry punkwood from the center of a rotten log to take the spark and make it a coal, and he carefully built a tiny fire of dry twigs on that one coal, building and blowing until he had a flame, and then adding scraps of bone dry bark and twig, and a twist of paper donated by Harding.

Through the whole performance, the two boys sat on the wet ground in the rain, only partially sheltered by the trees overhead. Jim fell asleep, despite the cold. He had been out in worse. The white boy had stood his watches on the deck of his frigate in all weathers, and he rested his back against Jim’s and tried to sleep as well.

If the transition from spark to coal to flame had taken a long time, the leap from flame to roaring fire was swift. Caesar fed his dry wood until he had a blaze, and then he
put wetter wood on and it burned regardless. He looked over at Harding, who seemed fascinated.

“On a dry day, you can build a tiny fire. On a wet day, you need mo’ fire jus’ to burn the damp wood.”

“We don’t burn much wood on board ship,” said Harding.

Caesar smiled and nodded. He took his brass kettle, fetched some water from the stream, then boiled some salt pork and biscuit together and woke the two boys. They ate voraciously, but without really waking up. They made him feel old.

He stretched a tarpaulin across the opening between two trees and lashed it with pine roots. Then he pushed the boys under it, threw a second tarp over them, and prepared himself a pipe of his new tobacco. It tasted wonderful, if a little damp, after a month or more of stale rations and ancient stuff issued by the navy and sold on by the sailors. He drank a little water from his canteen, ate the rest of the salt pork and washed the kettle, and crawled in with the two boys. Mostly, he was content.

The boat came for them the next day, on time and even a little early. Caesar received his share of praise. It appeared that Mr. Harding’s map was to everyone’s satisfaction, as was the site of the camp and the peninsula as a whole. The governor decreed that they were going ashore.

Harding came back to thank them that same evening. He gave Jim a metal pencil with some leads and a little book of blank sheets, and he gave Caesar a clasp knife.

“I’ve never had so much praise from my captain all at once.”

“What did the governor say?”

“He told Captain Lovell and the marine officer that he wanted to put the force ashore to keep you all from dying of disease. And then he laughed and said that he could at least be thought to be campaigning in Virginia if he was ashore.”

Caesar shook his head. “We’re better off here.”

“Will we make more maps, suh?” asked Jim, and Harding nodded.

“I’ll ask for you.”

The British marines were the best soldiers Caesar had seen. They led the landings from boats provided by the navy, dashing ashore and forming loose lines, every man using the cover along the shingle. There was no opposition; the rebels hadn’t smoked the landing and were forty miles away or more.

Command had responsibilities that Caesar hadn’t anticipated. As a corporal, he knew more than the other men about these landings. He knew that they were not intended as a step in a campaign to reclaim Virginia from the rebels; the sergeants and officers had made it clear that Governor Dunmore had abandoned any real hope of retaking Virginia for the king by force of arms. But taken together, the need of the men for exercise and the threat of disease on the ships mandated a landing. Five weeks’ waste lay in the bilges and around them in the slack water of the Chesapeake. The governor intended to take this little peninsula, hold it, and make it an exercise ground for his army.

The wind was bitter coming over the open bay. Caesar’s men all had brown wool jackets, but some of the newer recruits had only shirts and navy slop trousers or petticoat breeches. They were nearly blue with cold. They gripped their muskets with white-knuckled hands, and Caesar knew that they would be useless in a fight.

The whaleboat holding his men landed on the sand with a hiss.

“Up oars,” called the midshipman, a stranger. He turned to Caesar. “This is as far as we go, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir.” The midshipman was so young his voice was still high, and he had no real authority. That came from the coxswain, a burly man behind him, who simply smiled
and jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the universal sign for “get out”. Caesar grasped the gunwale and leapt over the side into less than a foot of water, and then Virgil followed over the other side, just as they had practiced. The rest of the men walked up the thwarts between the rowers, and the sailors handed them their muskets, which had been stored along the bottom boards. It went very smoothly, and Caesar was pleased to see Lope, his newest man, standing on the beach with his musket, bayonet, and cartridge box, as it meant that his was the first boat unloaded. Caesar enjoyed the little courtesies of command; he touched his hat to the midshipman.

“Thank you, sir.”

The boy returned the gesture. “First on the beach, after the marines.” The coxswain, a decent sort who smoked constantly, waved his pipe at Caesar. He had offered a good price for any tobacco they could “liberate” in the course of their jaunt ashore; had purchased half of what Caesar had brought from the mapping party. The coxswain was sure that the expedition was doomed, and even claimed to know where they were bound next.

“Marker! Second Section marker!” Caesar called the ritual words, even though his marker man, Virgil, was ten feet away. Virgil pulled himself erect and put his musket on his shoulder with a negligent air, but the completion of the movement left him in the position of a soldier, the very personification of his section.

“Second Section! Fall in!” The rest of the men, even the recruits, ran to their places in the line, forming two ranks with the tallest in the center and the shortest on the flanks. Caesar’s section was almost a platoon since the latest draft of runaway slaves. He had twenty men.

The other boats were hanging back in the current. Caesar didn’t know enough about the water to understand what was delaying the second wave of boats. His were the only Loyal Ethiopians on the beach.