Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  “You’ve come a long way.” She wiped the sweat from the mare’s flanks.

  Jonathon, secretly wishing she had shown more enthusiasm for his arrival, slid from the saddle. “I left the city at nine this morning, crossed at Davie Logan’s, and here I am.”

  He had ridden miles to the north, crossed the Delaware, then ridden the long miles back on the New Jersey bank, and Caroline, who had learned the hard way that work should be done economically, shook her head in amazement. “What’s wrong with the usual ferry?”

  “Everything. I didn’t want to be seen.”

  “By whom?”

  “Anyone who might stop me.” Jonathon said it to mystify her, then smiled. “And I wanted to see you. Can we talk?”

  Caroline took him towards the river where there was a small rise of pale grass on which they could sit. She seemed to be in a daze, as though she knew what was about to be said, and what she ought to say in return, yet at the same time it was all so unexpected and unsettling. “You’ve run away?” she asked Jonathon.

  “I’m not sure if that’s an exact description. Perhaps I’ve been driven away? Expelled from Eden.” He gestured across the rippling water to where, beyond the silhouetted city, the sun was sheeting the western sky with a wash that melded from a fierce crimson gold to a delicate pale pink.

  “Driven away?”

  “I was asked to deliver these to the British.” Jonathon fumbled in a pouch at his belt and produced folded papers that he showed to Caroline. Then, as she looked through the sheets, the words poured out of him. How his uncle had demanded his loyalty, and how Jonathon had not liked to refuse his uncle directly because it would have seemed ungrateful after all the years of kindness, and how Jonathon had always feared that this break with his guardian must come, and how, rather than provoke a terrible argument with his uncle, he had decided to let Abel Becket believe that he was riding in obedience to deliver the treacherous papers to the enemy.

  He was as full of words, Caroline thought, as a preacher man. “But you’re not going to deliver them, are you?”

  For answer Jonathon took the sheets from her and tore them into scraps. “I shall have to write to my uncle and tell him I disobeyed. I suppose that’s a cowardly way of doing it, but it seemed for the best.” He scattered the scraps into the wind. “There! All Woollard’s work in vain.”

  “Woollard?”

  “The repulsive Ezra!” Jonathon laughed. “But I’m free of them all now! And I couldn’t stay there! I couldn’t watch the British gloat over us.” He seemed to shudder at the thought. “No, there’s only one thing to do now, and that’s fight them.”

  Caroline watched the scraps of paper blow in the small wind that blew towards the great furnace glow that blazed on the western horizon. “What will your uncle do? When he finds out?”

  “I think he’ll be angry.”

  “Will you lose your inheritance?”

  Jonathon smiled. “Does that matter?”

  “Not to me. But to you?”

  And again Jonathon launched himself into words as eloquent as any Caroline had ever heard from a pulpit. The lawyers and the politicians spoke of liberty with the same glib ease that the preachers spoke of repentance, but Jonathon could invest the word with a heart-touching fervour. He believed that the British were a corrupt and tyrannical race who had betrayed the fine ideals of their own people in America. The time had come when the Patriots must defend those ideals. To Jonathon this was not a war about stamp tax, or about threepence on tea, but a war about God’s own country where honest men could make a new heaven on an old earth. There would be no more Placemen from London, sent to live in the great houses and take their unearned salaries from honest folk, but instead there would be a good people on a good soil, America, and what was an inheritance against that great ideal?

  Caroline listened to the wondrous words and, because she dealt in realities more than in ideas, she asked a flat question when the words ended. “And what will you do if you lose your inheritance?”

  “I’ll farm.” Jonathon teased her and was rewarded by a shocked look of disbelief. He laughed. “I can become a lawyer, maybe a politician? Just so long as we’re free, and just so long as you’re waiting for me when I come back from battle.”

  He had spoken casually, but no less earnestly because of it. Caroline had known, as soon as she had recognized the strange horseman, that Jonathon had come to demand a decision of her. She had expected it for so long, but it still surprised her that he wanted to ride to war with her colour pinned to his lance. She was suddenly swept by a great pity for him. How could a cripple live in the harsh world of gunfire and sabre blades and blood?

  “You want me to wait?” She said it to gain time in which to think of her answer.

  “It’s more than I deserve,” Jonathon said. Caroline, as she thought, stared at the shivering reflections on the wide river, and Jonathon stared at Caroline. Her looks did not match the refined and elegant delicacy of the city, which so prized a fashionable paleness that the Fisher farm sold lemons, cucumbers, and tomatoes to be made into poultices for blanching the skin. Caroline’s was a wilder and rougher beauty that some men might have thought coarse, but which had enslaved Jonathon. “It’s more than I deserve,” Jonathon repeated, “but I even dare to want you to do more than wait for me.”

  Caroline knew what that further question was, and she did not want to face it now, not under the great glow of the dying sun in an evening when emotions were already charged too high for good sense. She frowned. “You shouldn’t be going at all …”

  “… I cannot stay.”

  Caroline turned on him fiercely. “God gave you other skills. Can you sit in a saddle all day? Do you have the strength for that?”

  “I did today.”

  “You walked the horse. Imagine galloping and turning, twisting and fighting!”

  But Jonathon was stubborn. “I can do whatever I have a mind to do. God gave me that strength, and it will be enough.”

  “I pray so.” Caroline stared again towards the dark and intricate skyline of the city that was punctured by church steeples and by the needle-sharp spire of the State House where lawyers had fashioned the Declaration of Independence, and where some of those lawyers, young enough to fight, had then packed their papers and said they had done enough for the revolution and would return to their estates. While Jonathon, out of his passion, would ride where they feared to go.

  She looked at him again. “Have you got food for the journey?”

  “It can be bought.”

  “I’ll make something.” She took refuge in practicality. “And you can sleep here tonight. There’s a bed that folds down in the kitchen for strangers.”

  Jonathon sensed her evasion and, quite gently, he took her right hand. “I don’t care where I sleep, but I do care that you’ll wait for me.”

  Caroline knew she had deflected the greater question, and she could not deny him the answer to the lesser. She nodded, “I’ll wait,” and, as soon as the words were said, she saw that he had implied assent to both questions, for his happiness was as golden and huge as the swelling and sinking sun on the western edge of the world. He held her suddenly, pressing his face to her hair, holding her as if he would never let her go. “I’ll wait,” she said again, but this time unprompted, a gift of her own wild and free will.

  While, across the river, the first lights of the city glowed soft and yellow behind windows to shake their reflections on the wide, hurrying river. On the far bank, in merchants’ houses and in the smaller tenements on the city’s edge, life went on in its commonplace way, but Jonathon felt as though he had leapt from darkness into light, and from confusion into the glorious promises of love. He was a Patriot, and he would fight for his country against the Bloodybacks and their Hessian mercenaries, and he would fight for this girl whose love he would earn and keep for ever.

  Jonathon, forsaking trade, was a rebel at last.

  Seven

  The company’s eve
ning parade was held on a patch of worn grassland close to the wood and turf bivouacs that were the men’s homes. Sergeant Scammell harangued the Light Company. “Listen to your uncle Scammell and don’t you dare bleeding laugh or I’ll skin your bloody arses.” He paced menacingly down the front rank. “We are short of ammunition. Therefore you are not to fire your bleeding muskets. You understand? You are only to fire your muskets if you get an order to fire your muskets. Not from a corporal, but from me. If any of you bastards fire without a bleeding order I’ll have the skin off your backs!” Scammell’s disgust at such an order was obvious, but the force with which he delivered it made the men nod nervously. The sergeant whirled round and pointed at Corporal Dale who, under Scammell’s command, would lead one of the night picquets. “What are you not to do, Corporal?”

  “Fire.”

  “Unless …?”

  “You tell us to, Sergeant.”

  “Good boy. If you see a rebel then pat him on his woolly head and tell him to fuck off. It’s all bloody mad, but this is the bloody army. And that goes for all of you!” He glared at the other men in the company who, like Sam, were not on guard duty this night. “Hands off your muskets or I’ll skin your backs! Picquets! To me!”

  The duty picquets trailed disconsolately behind Sergeant Scammell to mount their night guard where the cultivated fields gave way to the thick, dark woods. The men who remained in the bivouac crouched about their fires, drank their ration of rum, and glanced enviously towards a small house where refugees from the nearby village of Germantown had taken shelter. “There’s women over there.” Liam Shaughnessy, a thin man who had been coughing blood in the last week, nudged Sam’s arm. “You want me to hold one down for you, Sam?”

  “It’s all right, Liam, I can manage.”

  “Nate can manage, can’t you?” Shaughnessy laughed, and the laugh turned into a foul grating cough. He spat into the fire, then grinned at Nate. “Scammy’s on duty all bleeding night. You should tuck yourself in with Maggie.”

  “What would you know, Liam?” Nate hated to hear men talk so familiarly of Maggie.

  Shaughnessy gave an evil grin. “He sold her to the Colonel last night, that’s what I heard. Two shilling, Nate!”

  Nate twisted towards Shaughnessy, but Sam pushed his brother back to the turf. “Shut up! Both of you!”

  “I’ll give the Irish bastard a kicking!” Nate pushed against his brother’s restraining arm. Shaughnessy had pulled his bayonet scabbard round on its shoulder sling and grinned wickedly as if inviting the attack.

  “For Christ’s sake, calm down!” Sam glared at his brother. “You cause enough trouble as it is.”

  “It’s only a doxie,” Shaughnessy said. “And there’ll be a lot of doxie in Philada, won’t there now?” Few of the men could pronounce the city’s name, or even cared to try. “There’ll be crack by the yard! Just waiting for us, Sam.” The delights of Philadelphia formed a constant and hopeful thread in the company’s conversation; it being generally agreed that a soldier’s dreams would be fulfilled there in the form of shelter, food, warmth, and a plenitude of women.

  Sam snapped a fence rail and threw it on to the fire. A vagary of wind blew smoke into his face. He coughed. “If we ever get to Philadelphia.”

  “We’ll get there,” Shaughnessy said. “Then kiss the girls, we will.” He laughed.

  Sam glanced towards the small house, no bigger, he thought, than his parents’ cottage where he had last seen his mother. He remembered, with a pang, how proud his mother used to be. “He’s quick,” she would say of Sam, though when the seven-year-old twins joined the stable staff at the big house as ostlers’ boys, the head coachman used to say that Sam needed his reins looped beneath the rings. Only lively, stubborn, and troublesome horses had reins looped low so that the bit could be levered into a twist against the horse’s mouth. Nate had never needed such curbing. Nate had always looked to Sam as his leader except on the day, three years before, when Nate had seen the red-coated soldiers following the drummer boy and Nate had been dazzled by their jackets and by the recruiting sergeant’s practised patter. Until then Nate had always been the shy twin. But now, for the second time in his life, but this time in a foreign field where the dusk shadowed the far trees, Nate needed his reins looped deep below the rings.

  Nate needed curbing because he still dreamed of desertion. “A corporal in Captain Courtney’s company ran today. They haven’t caught him yet.”

  “They won’t if he’s clever.” Liam picked a shred of beef from his teeth.

  “They catch most of them,” Sam insisted.

  “Nah!” Nate was scornful. “The army just tells you that, don’t they? They want you to be scared! Most go to the Yankees! More pay and no floggings!” He spoke as passionately as any Methodist seeking souls. “And you’re not in their army for life! You don’t even have to join if you don’t want to! You can just take the land they give you!”

  “Who says?” Sam challenged.

  “It’s a fact! Everyone knows!”

  Night was falling. All around Sam the presence of the army was betrayed by cooking fires that lay across the darkened folds of ground like a fallen blanket of stars. A rain began to fall, hissing on embers and drumming on tricorn hats that bore the proud red hackles of killers. A dog limped past Sam’s fire and sheered away from a soldier’s blow. Somewhere a child cried, then was cuffed into silence. The cavalry horses whinnied from their far lines. The picquets, fearful for the punishment which would follow if they opened fire, were quiet at the encampment’s dark edge.

  “And when the Yankees lose,” Liam Shaughnessy lit a clay pipe with a burning twig from the fire, “they’ll round up all the deserters and hang them. No thank you, Nate. Isn’t worth it, nor is it.”

  “I’m going to run,” Nate said stubbornly.

  “You always talk about it,” Liam sneered, “but you never will.”

  “I will.” Nate still dreamed of Maggie’s paradise beyond the horizon. “You’ll be jealous. I’ll be tucked up with a girl and you’ll be sweating on a march somewhere.”

  “I’ll be flogging you.” Shaughnessy laughed.

  Nate ignored the Irishman, turning instead to his brother. “Would you flog me if I ran, Sam?”

  “I’d knock your bloody head off, you silly bugger.” Sam said it lightly.

  “I mean it, Sam.” Nate stared earnestly at his brother. “Would you?”

  Sam rubbed his face. “I said how I’d look after you, brother, and so I will. You stay with me, and there’ll be no call for a flogging.” He looked at his twin and saw the unhappiness on Nate’s face. “For God’s sake, Nate! Liam’s right. There’ll be girls in their hundreds in Philadelphia! Just waiting for us. Everyone says so. They’re loyal. They want us to come!”

  “It’s Maggie,” Nate said simply.

  “Bugger Maggie.” Sam was tired of holding his brother’s reins. He looked away to see an American youth, scarce more than a boy, who was nervously exploring the battalion’s bivouac. Liam Shaughnessy, suspecting that the boy was after some of the company’s food, growled a belligerent challenge.

  The boy shied away from the harsh words. He wore ragged brown trousers, a cast-off torn coat, and had an odd, wide-brimmed hat above his long hair. An old pistol was thrust into his rope belt. He gestured uncertainly towards the lights across the fields as if to suggest that he were merely on his way to the village.

  “You want something?” Sam spoke just a little too gruffly, playing the soldier, but his voice was a kindness compared to Liam’s, and the young man looked relieved. “The guns,” he said pathetically.

  “You want to see the cannons?”

  “Yes.” The boy jerked his head towards the small house. “I’m from there.” He offered the information as though it would soften the Redcoats’ hostility.

  Sam pointed towards the village. “Guns are in the market place, lad. Ask nicely now. You don’t want your head blown away by a nervous sentry, do you now?”

/>   The boy, who was merely curious about these strange red-coated creatures who had appeared during the day, seemed grateful for Sam’s few words which, if not altogether friendly, were not downright hostile either. He grinned again, then wandered uncertainly onwards, weaving a cautious path around the knots of resting men. A fight suddenly broke out in Captain Phillip’s company. Two drunken men were clawing and scratching while their comrades made a loud, jeering ring about them. The sight made the young American nervous, and he stopped, unsure whether it was safe to proceed.

  Sam lay back, careless of the rain. “What will you do,” he asked Nate, “when the rebellion’s over and they’re looking for all the runners?”

  “Big place.” Nate gestured towards the dark. “Can’t search everywhere, Sam. And there’s a living to be made here. Land’s good. No bleeding officers. No sergeants.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Captain Kelly,” Sam said loyally, “and Scammy’s all right if you stay upwind of the bastard.” A musket fired from the field’s far edge, then another. “Jesus, Nate, I don’t want to see you hung or shot.”

  Nate dropped his voice so that only Sam could hear him. “Maggie’s got some civilian clothes, like you said. She’s hidden some food, too, and got some money. We’re going to do it, Sam, we’re really going to do it!”

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  “We’re going to do it! This week!” Nate was whispering urgently. “Like you said, Sam? Proper clothes, bit of money, and hide from the bloody cavalry for two days. What the hell’s happening?” Nate suddenly twisted round to stare north. The muskets, which had been ordered to stay silent because of the shortage of ammunition, were firing again.

  Sergeant Scammell’s voice, far out on the edge of the encampment, shouted fierce, but then the muskets blazed again in the snapping crackle of volley fire.