Washington and Caesar (63 page)

Their wood was full of green-coated men in tall helmets. Caesar knew a few of the men in the Queen’s Rangers and he accepted a little cigar from a corporal who had just taken a long pull at his canteen. Mr. Martin was explaining the frustrating nature of their attack to one of Colonel Robinson’s men, a black.

“There’s no cover to approach them,” he said, and Simcoe just nodded.

“Go on back to camp and rest. I’ll send for you if I need you.”

They crossed the long field to the camp area, deserted except for the other soldiers in reserve. The Highlanders looked fierce, still capable, but they were so red in the face that Caesar worried for them. The handful of mounted troops were watering their horses all the time, and the Jaegers lay in the sun and burned, their pale complexions betraying them. Caesar kept looking up the ridge to the place where the grenadiers and now the lights had gone. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gone into action without Captain Stewart, and he didn’t like the sound of firing to the south.

As soon as they started up the hill, Crawford knew that they were too late. It was obvious that the grenadiers had been clawed cruelly by the artillery fire they had heard during the whole miserable march to the hill. As they started the climb in the full heat of the mid-afternoon sun, the grenadiers were retiring. They were magnificent soldiers, and not one of them ran, but their companies were the size of platoons and they were withdrawing off the hill steadily. Stewart could see that he had already lost men to the heat and expected that the grenadiers, in action all morning, would be worse.

Crawford couldn’t see what pressure they were taking from his spot at the left end of the company. And then he looked to the front in time to see the whole woods fill with Continentals like a bucket filling under a pump. In a moment there were hundreds of them forming just above him on the hill.

“Halt!” cried Captain Stewart, racing down the line. The company next to theirs kept marching and was instantly exposed to a storm of fire. Stewart yelled to McDonald
and then rode up to Crawford. McDonald was leading the firing.

“Hold here for as long as you can, but for God’s sake give the ground if you must. I’m going to see what the grenadiers intend. I’ll be back in a moment.”

Crawford saluted and turned to face the front. The rebels, who had been a mob a moment before, were forming like soldiers. Crawford’s company fired into them and they took the volley at close range and continued to form their line. A company off to the left was already firing. Crawford stepped out of the line and walked back to the center, where Captain Stewart usually stood to fight the company. The first platoon was almost loaded and, never taking his eyes from the enemy, he nodded to McDonald, who was preparing to fire. His men were outnumbered badly, and he doubted that these well-drilled enemy troops would fire any worse than they formed. He spared a glance for Captain Stewart riding low in his saddle off to the right and well up the hill, and Jeremy following him, and he saw Stewart’s horse go down as if all its legs had been cut at once. Stewart did not rise.

Jeremy leapt his horse over his downed master and fired a pistol at the first rebel to appear in the distance. He looked around desperately, but the grenadiers were just too far off to the right and the rebels were pouring down this part of the hill. He dismounted.

A ball had killed the horse dead. Its whole weight lay on Stewart, and Stewart was barely conscious.

“Get ye gone, Jeremy!” he muttered.

“Nonsense, sir.” Jeremy tried to give him a little water but the movement caused Stewart to faint from the pain. Jeremy cushioned his head with his saddlebags and took a moment to do those things he had heard veterans recommend you do when you are about to be captured. He took his watch and put it next to his skin, concealed
his ivory-handled dagger in his boot, and put several golden guineas inside his shirt. He saw the rebels forming their company just forty yards away and he worried that they might fire on him, so he tied his white stock to his sword and waved it. The enemy company marched right by him, their officer simply waving at him.

“Come, that’s gentlemanly,” he said aloud, hoping his words would comfort Stewart, and turned to find another party of rebels with a tall man in an old blue coat at their head. They were moving carefully, formed in open order, and a number of them had weapons pointed at Jeremy. He held out his sword to the leader, who looked faintly familiar.

The leader grinned. “You killed Weymes,” he said.

Bludner raised his pistol and shot Jeremy dead.

Forty minutes later, Sir Henry Clinton’s counterattack with all the grenadiers and lights and all the reserves cleared the hill to the crest, and Caesar ran to the fallen horse. Stewart was gone, but Jeremy lay there, his hands out on the ground and his legs a little apart, lying face down. He had been plundered thoroughly, his watch and guineas taken and all Stewart’s saddle gear ripped clear of his horse. Caesar picked Jeremy up and threw him over his shoulder. Jeremy was still wearing his breeches, covered in blood, and his boots—apparently the tight fit was more than casual plunderers were prepared to face. He carried the body down the hill as the sun pounded on them and the order was given that finally allowed them to start an orderly withdrawal from the field. He carried Jeremy for over an hour, until the first halt, not speaking to the men around him.

When he gathered the men of the Guides and told them to prepare for a burial party, some men from Stewart’s company appeared with a cart. The cart had some wounded grenadiers in it, but the grenadiers were quickly convinced that their cart could carry a dead man as well. They stepped off into the heat, and marched all night with the cart in
their midst, and the moans of the wounded grenadiers were like a lament for Jeremy, and defeat.

To the south, George Lake’s men stood on the crest of the hill and watched the last of the British light companies march away from them. They were too tired to pursue, and they had taken casualties themselves, although more from the heat than the enemy.

“I think we won,” croaked a man in George’s company. It was said quietly, as if the saying would break the spell.

George stretched the fingers of his right hand where he had clutched a musket all day.

“Well, boys, they were trying to retreat when the day started, and at the end of it, they retreated.” He looked at the ranks of his men and smiled. “On the other hand, we’re here, and they ain’t, which is a sight better than we’re used to.”

They gave a weak cheer, and another as they saw Washington and his staff ride out of the stuffy gloom again. Lake saw Lafayette peering down the hill at the backs of the last British light troops, and listened to them as they tried to count the casualties, and then, in the boldest moment of his life, George Lake stepped in front of Washington’s horse.

“Give you the joy of your victory, sir,” he said, amazed at his own voice. Washington looked up from a map and peered at him for a moment, and then smiled, the thin-lipped smile that never showed his teeth.

“Not much of a victory,” he said, but his men began to cheer again, and the cheer spread in waves. And then Washington’s grin split his face, and his eyes kindled and the cheers went on. Lafayette shook his hand, and then George’s, and then they were all around him, a wave of noise that spread from the center until the British could hear it two miles away.

Caesar was keeping the men together with physical threats by the time they halted, and Mr. Martin was bringing up the rear with the stragglers. But when they had rested for a few minutes and their legs stopped shaking, they took a little water and some hard tack and felt human enough to bury Jeremy.

They took turns digging as they always did, although he was just one man, and the contributions from Stewart’s company made it go fast. Some of Stewart’s men had stripped Jeremy’s boots and bloody breeches and then put on clean from his baggage, and they wrapped him in a clean linen sheet. Virgil carved him a cross from a downed branch as quick as he could, and Mr. Crawford paid the farmer in whose field they were going to plant him to get a stone. They were close to areas that their patrols would operate when they came out from New York, and Caesar thought they might get this way again. He didn’t seem able to think of much else, except that Jeremy had become a friend of a sort he had never had before. Jeremy had taught him so much. And that—like Sergeant Peters—he was dead.

McDonald came up to him and just nodded a few times, and then put Jeremy’s ivory-handled button dagger in his hand.

“He had it in his boot. We thought you ought to have it.” Some other men from Stewart’s company nodded behind him.

When Jeremy was in the ground and they had fired a volley over him, some officers came up to protest the firing, but Mr. Martin and Mr. Crawford sent them packing. Virgil, Willy and McDonald lit pipes, and they passed the tobacco around as they had for their dead since Virginia.

Caesar found that he couldn’t get the pipe into his mouth and it struck him that he was crying, great choking sobs that wracked him until Virgil put his arms around Caesar and hugged him close a moment. He hadn’t cried for Tonny,
or Tom, or Peters or any of the others, but he cried for Jeremy, and Virgil sat beside him with his arm around him, as the night suddenly cooled with the passing of that awful heat.

New Jersey and New York, July 4, 1778

Jeremy was dead.

It hit Stewart at different times, because Jeremy had been there so often and because he was weak and needed the man. Both men, Jeremy the servant and the other Jeremy, who could make a joke about Miss McLean and a suggestion about Sally. Sometimes in one breath.

He would have to do something about Sally. Even in a fever, he could see that.

He lay in a little house somewhere in the Jerseys and watched the sun creep across his white, white quilt. He thought about Jeremy, and Sally, and once he found himself having a conversation with Jeremy who was not, of course, there. He worried for a little that he was losing his mind, but later he realized that he had a fever.

Men came to see him from time to time, and a girl fed him soup. He didn’t really know the men, but he had enough spirit to see that they were Continental officers and that they were kind. He had visited their wounded often enough. It was that sort of war, sometimes.

Then he woke in the night and was well. Weaker, somehow, than when he dreamed and spoke with Jeremy, but better, too. He’d had fevers before, and he knew this one had just broken. He lay awake, thinking about Jeremy in a different way. He smiled a little, and slept.

When he next awoke, one of the men was by his side with a watch, looking at his pulse and counting, while another was standing behind him.

“Quite a credit to the trade, this fellow. Healthy as a horse in no time,” the nearer man said, putting his hand down on the coverlet. “You awake, sir?”

“I am.”

“It always pleases a doctor when one of his patients does him the courtesy of surviving a treatment.”

“Give my man the bill.” That little pain. He had no man. “Perhaps not. Give it to me, I suppose.”

“I think the Continental Army is footing the bill, sir. But I need to tell you that your leg, while healing, has been shockingly set about, and that I took a pistol ball out of your shoulder, and another out of an older wound low on your back. It was there, and I thought I might as well cut.”

Stewart nodded, a little troubled by the number of wounds, and puzzled, as he couldn’t remember getting any of them.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“Not I, sir. Perhaps Captain Lake, here. But you are on the mend. I’ll look in again later—always a pleasure to see one that heals, eh?”

The doctor indicated some medicines to the lady of the house and bowed his way out. The officer remained, watching him in silence, as the lady moved about the little room, tossing the pillow and sitting him up. His arm was in a very tight bandage that went across his chest, and his leg was in another. He was afraid to look at the base of the bed, so sure was he that one of his legs was gone, but she moved the blankets to air them and roll him over to strip the sheets, and he saw it. It wasn’t exactly handsome, and there was some blood and some yellow fluid on the bandage, but the whole leg was there.

The woman prattled as she moved about the room.

“I hope the captain doesn’t think we sympathize with the king just because they gave us a king’s officer to heal up,” she said, smiling at the other man. “But we are all God’s creatures, aren’t we, sir?”

The Continental officer smiled and bowed his head.

She turned on Captain Stewart. “And you’re awake, so we ought to come to be friends, don’t you think?”

He wanted to retreat from all that energy.

“Your servant, ma’am.”

She curtsied. “And yours, sir. I’m Betsy Holding. And you?”

“Captain John Julius Stewart, ma’am.” He looked at the other officer. “If you are my guard, sir, I think I can guarantee that I will make no attempt to escape today.”

The other man smiled a little nervously and tossed his hat in his hands. He made a sketchy little bow and Stewart thought that he was probably not very well bred, but then wondered what his own bow had looked like before Jeremy got hold of it. Always Jeremy.

“Captain George Lake, sir. I…” Captain Lake clearly had something very difficult to say. He looked out the window, and Betsy, a woman who had several grown children and was widely known for her sense, bustled around the room one more time and withdrew.

“I can see the gentlemen need to talk,” she said.

Lake pulled up a chair and sat on it, backwards, his chin on the top rung of the ladderback. Stewart noted that he was wearing a very fine hunting sword. French, he thought.

“Can you tell me how I came to be captured?” he asked.

Lake looked at him and there was some sort of hurt in his eyes. Stewart wondered if he had done the man an injury, but it wasn’t that sort of hurt.

“Your horse was hit by a ball. I think it was a roundshot from one of our guns, or perhaps a piece of grape. I saw you go down myself, all in a tumble. Nasty fall.”

Stewart nodded. “I think I can agree to that.”

“I marched right by you. Your men were trying to flank us and the grenadiers were rallying. I didn’t think you looked like much of a threat.”

Stewart nodded, and Lake looked away.

“Your…your man came and stood over you.” Lake leaned forward. His eyes were intense.

Stewart tried to raise a hand.

“I know. He was hit. Somehow, I remember that part. I felt him fall across me.”

“He was shot while he was trying to surrender, sir. I watched it, and I have waited for you to wake up because I wanted to apologize. I can’t think why your man was shot. It turned my stomach. And I know the man who did it—Bludner, who was my own sergeant once.”

Stewart looked at the other man, who seemed very moved. He was young and gawky, with a colonial drawl, and his uniform was not quite the thing, but he had that air of confidence that Stewart always associated with the better type of officers. Stewart noticed these things because he was quite consciously walling himself off from the knowledge that his Jeremy had been shot down in cold blood. He admitted to himself that he had been conscious, had suspected this to be true and simply ignored it. He found himself looking into George Lake’s clear green eyes. They were wide and deep and didn’t seem to hide any secrets at all. He was very young, and for a moment, Stewart felt as old as the hills.
Bludner,
now that struck a chord. It was a name Sally said both awake and asleep. Stewart tried to overcome his fatigue.

“Bludner?
A slave-taker?”

“I think he did some such, yes. I thought to report him to the army.”

Stewart sat back, tired and old.

“Come back another day, sir.” He put his head back on the pillow, and went instantly to sleep.

They moved back into the barracks easily, as if they had never been away, and all the women came out to greet them. Many of the Guides’ women had never gone to Philadelphia because they’d found work in New York or just didn’t want to follow the army, and Caesar thought that perhaps none of them had expected them to be in Philadelphia very long.

Black Lese was there, and Mrs. Peters, coughing and weeping a little and happy to see them back. And there was little Nelly Van Sluyt, who looked half her man’s size, and others—women and children who seemed to outnumber the soldiers five to one or more. Caesar had seen that the men were paid before they marched to the barracks, and now he watched attentively as money was handed over to wives who hadn’t seen much but rations for nearly a year.

He saw Polly standing with Big Lese and talking to her, bobbing her head as she did when addressing someone her elder, the very soul of courtesy. She looked up at him and smiled, a tiny secret smile with a long message attached, and he responded with a great grin that cracked his whole face in two. And then he went back to work, finding barracks space for the new recruits he’d acquired since they marched for the transports a year before and occasionally facing the hard job of throwing an interloper out of a bunk he or she didn’t have a right to. Many black refugees came to the barracks first, or last. And there were holes in the ranks, and losses, and women who knew from letters that their man was dead but had come for the parade in hopes there had been a mistake, and other, harder women who came to get their man’s last pay, or perhaps a replacement man. It was the same at every barracks in New York, and the men had joked about it the night before. Now it didn’t seem so funny, with women and children being turned out because they were no longer attached to the army, and others coming in. They had to find space for new men they had picked up, or move men. Sam the bugler was no longer a child, and needed
a bed. Tonny had fallen and a new corporal got his space. On and on. Through it all, Caesar and Fowver worked, each wanting to be elsewhere or to enjoy some of the happier portions, but they had no time and theirs was the only authority high enough to settle the resentments.

When Lieutenant Martin arrived, Caesar left him with two of the stickiest domestic situations and plunged into the kitchen, where Mrs. Peters and Black Lese were measuring out the allowance of pork. It was a pork day, and there would be some pudding—plum duff, by the smell.

“Where’s Polly?” he asked and they both gave him the knowing look that matrons reserve for the young and besotted.

“She waited,” said Lese in her West Indian sing-song.

“But she said that as you were so important,” said Mrs. Peters, “she’d just go about her business.”

They laughed at him when his face fell. “I do like to see you look like a normal young man, an’ not just Mars, the God of War,” said Mrs. Peters. She had a special privilege: although her husband was dead and had never technically been a member of the Black Guides, or even the Provincial Corps of the British Army, she was mysteriously listed on their rolls and continued there. She and Lese laughed at his confusion and weighed another piece of pork.

“Of course,” Mrs. Peters continued, “she did say that if you were decently repentant, she and her father might consider having you to dinner.”

“It’s not my fault!” he said, looking at the two of them. They, if anyone, should understand. Lese Fowver knew every detail of every scrap of a quarrel in the company, and Mrs. Peters had been dealing with barracks issues for four years, and a house full of slaves for most of her life. They both just smiled again.

“She’s in that little church on Queen Street, sewing,” Lese said. “Maybe you should find her.”

Mrs. Peters stopped him. “Did you leave that nice
Mr. Martin to deal with the likes of Hester Black?” Hester was the most married, and most voluble, woman in the company. She rarely lacked an issue for her feeling of grievance.

“I did.”

“Shame on you, Julius Caesar. And he wanting to get away and find his Miss Hammond.” But Caesar was gone.

The next day Stewart was able to sit up and eat unaided, and read the Bible, which seemed to be the house’s only book. He thumbed through it idly, looking at stories, and thinking about slavery. He could almost feel his bones knitting.

Mrs. Holding sat with him, now that he made decent company. She seemed surprised to find that he didn’t have a tail, and that the Bible didn’t burn his hands. She and her husband were dyed-in-the-wool Whigs, “patriots” as they called themselves. He tried not to use the word “rebel” in her house. She had two sons, both in the militia, and two daughters, both married to men of property. She reminded him of every good wife in Edinburgh, and yet she was thoroughly American in the same way that the Miss Hammonds were.

“Do you have a slave, ma’am?” he asked suddenly. Her mouth became firm.

“I don’t hold with it,” she said crossly. “It ain’t right for Christian folk.” He wondered if she had ever allowed her husband an opinion. He liked her.

“Just so,” he said, putting his head back on the pillow.

Polly kissed him and held him close, but before they had time to babble ten words, she stopped him and pushed him away. He thought it was because they were in a church.

“Sally’s in a state,” she said.

He wanted to stay with Polly and she wanted him to stay, but Sally was there between them and he knew he
owed it to the woman to find her and talk. He could imagine that Sally was in a state, and he thought he knew why.

He went to find Sally. She wasn’t at Mother Abbott’s anymore—Captain Stewart had seen to that. She had a set of rooms up two flights of stairs over a hat maker’s on Broadway. It was an expensive set of rooms. He was careful going there. Although it was only a few steps up the street from the Moor’s Head, people in New York were touchy about color. He thought of Jeremy, who seemed above such notions and yet completely conversant with them, and he thought of fencing with Jeremy just a few doors along. His eyes filled for a moment and he had to stop. When he was himself again, he went to the narrow door for the upstairs rooms and opened it. A woman in a neat bonnet poked her head out of the door to the shop.

“Are you a friend of our lodger, young man?” she asked.

“I am, ma’am,” he said, making a leg as Jeremy had taught him. She nodded as if it were her due.

“Do your friend a service then, young man. Tell her that I will not have a lodger who makes a nuisance! And that goes doubly for a black one. I don’t care how solid her money is.”

Caesar bowed. He had learned from Jeremy how useful these courtesies were for hiding one’s thoughts.

“And no male visitors in the evening, or she is out. I told my husband that it was a mistake to take your kind in here.”

He bowed again. He felt Jeremy’s voice in his head, and he smiled.

“What kind is that, ma’am?”

She looked at him and shook her head as if it was a matter of little importance.

“What visitor did she have?”

“Now that’s a proper question for a brother to ask of his sister, I’m thinking.” Caesar wasn’t sure what he thought of being Sally’s brother, but he let it pass. “A little white
man.
I
didn’t like his looks, and I’m certain he hit her. What do you think of that, young man?”

He shook his head.

“Hmmf. As I thought. None of us is any better than God made us, I expect. But I want her quiet or gone, do you hear?” She nodded vigorously and shut the door.