Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  Indeed, it seemed to Sam that both he and Vane spent more time in Mrs Crowl’s house than in their own lodgings. The Captain, naturally, went through the front door to pursue his siege of the widow, while Sam went in by the servants’ backyard to fulfil the promise he had made on a battlefield. Sam took Jonathon food from the commissary warehouse, and medicines that Sam made himself.

  The medicines were essential, for Jonathon was slow to mend. The ague which visited Philadelphia every spring and autumn threatened Jonathon’s recovery and, to stave it off, Sam boiled willow bark in water, then fed it to the wounded boy. Mrs Crowl was amused by Sam’s remedies, but not so trusting in them that she had not asked for the liquorice and Keyser’s Pills which Sam had promised to deliver that evening.

  Sam announced himself in Martha’s kitchen with a mock fanfare. “Two tails of mutton, one box of candles, and the liquorice I promised.” Sam flinched from the kitchen’s steaming heat. “What on earth are you doing, Jenny?”

  Jenny, aided by two kitchen maids, was heating water over the fire then pouring the boiling cauldrons into a vast, zinc-lined tub that stood on the kitchen flagstones. “I thought you were never coming!” Jenny ignored Sam’s questions. “Look at the state of you!”

  “I slaughtered a couple of sheep.” Sam kept his best uniform for when he must attend the Captain, at other times wearing his old battle-stained red coat and grey breeches. “Tails?”

  “On the table,” the black woman said cheerfully. “And wipe your feet before you come in here, Sam Gilpin.”

  Sam looked at his boots. “They ain’t bad, Jenny!”

  “They’re filthy!” Jenny poured a last great cauldron into the steaming tub, then shooed the two maids out of the room. “Your boots are like the rest of you,” she said scornfully to Sam, “filthy!”

  “Filthy, foul, stinking, disgusting, disgraceful, rank, nasty!” Mrs Crowl had come into the kitchen. “You hear me, Sam Gilpin? Nasty, horrid, awful, British. You. You’re filthy!”

  Sam, hurt by the insults, peered down at his red coat. “It ain’t bad! A bit bloody, that’s all.”

  “Not your coat, you idiot, you! Get your clothes off.”

  “What?”

  Martha smiled at him. “You’re going to have a bath, Samuel.”

  “No, ma’am! Please. Ma’am!” Sam was backing around the kitchen, at last understanding the purpose of the steaming tub. “No!”

  Martha locked the back door. “I like you, Sam, God help me and you might be a British soldier, but you’re actually, somehow, quite likeable, but if you’re visiting this house I want you clean. And I want you to go on visiting! It’s good for Jonathon, but you stink!”

  “No worse than anyone else!”

  Martha held out a wooden rolling-pin. “Hit the British bastard, Jenny!”

  “No!” Sam decided to make a stand against the two women. “I ain’t having a bath! I brought you the liquorice!”

  “Sam, dear Sam” – Martha was trying hard not to laugh – “when did you last bathe?”

  “Ain’t never bathed. Not in hot water!”

  “Good God! You mean that’s a lifetime of muck on you?”

  “I wash!” Sam said indignantly.

  “You stand in the rain sometimes?” Martha enquired sweetly. “Look at your hair, Sam! It has things crawling under that muck! And you smell.”

  Sam stubbornly shook his head. “It’s bad for you, isn’t it?”

  Martha smiled. “Educate me, Sam?”

  “Bathing.” Sam gestured towards the waiting tub. “Gives you the fever. Everyone knows that. It can kill me!”

  “Then I’ll slaughter a Redcoat for America and throw you in!” Martha advanced menacingly on the cornered Sam, who, close to panic, held up warding hands.

  “Now, ma’am, please!”

  “I bathe, Sam,” Martha said confidingly, “once a week. All over, isn’t that right, Jenny?” The black maid was too amused to speak. “And Jenny bathes, Sam,” Martha said invitingly. “You can’t smell us a mile off, can you? Pigs don’t flee from us in horror, strong men don’t faint, horses don’t bolt. Even Captain Vane bathes! But you! You’re foul! Now get your clothes off!”

  Sam drew himself up to his considerable height and assumed the proper dignity of a captain’s servant. “I am not, ma’am, going to undress in …”

  “You pompous ass!” Martha said. “Jenny! Throw a bucket of water over him.”

  “No! Please, no!” Sam watched Jenny pick up a bucket. “All right. But I’ll do it on my own!”

  Martha nodded. “A proper reticence. Think of yourself as a horse, Sam. Give yourself a good hard scrub with a brush first. Then the soap. It’s rather expensive soap, Sam, but you may use as much as is necessary. And don’t forget your hair. Untangle that silly thing at the back and put it all under water! I want you clean, Sam.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “We shall leave you in modest peace,” Martha said, “and if you run away, you’ll never be allowed back. No more of Jenny’s ale, no more sitting by the fire while every other Redcoat catches fever in the swamps.”

  “Yes, ma’am, very good, ma’am.”

  Sam waited for the women to leave, briefly considered an ignoble flight up the kitchen steps to the backyard, then, weighing that salvation against the threatened withdrawal of Mrs Crowl’s comforts, resigned himself to the dreadful ordeal. He listened at the kitchen door, then, having satisfied himself that no one lurked in ambush, he slowly undressed before putting a tentative foot in the water.

  It was hot. He had never put a foot into hot water before and instinctively he pulled back.

  “We’re coming in!” Martha’s voice called gaily from beyond the door.

  “No!” But the door opened, and Sam’s only escape was to plunge into the scalding tub. He bellowed in shock. Water splashed over the sides as Martha and Jenny, looking grimly businesslike, marched into the kitchen.

  “Wash him, Jenny!”

  “No!” Sam clutched his drawn-up knees, but Jenny simply reached into the tub, seized an ankle, and upturned Sam so that his head went underwater and he was forced to flounder back to safety.

  “Nothing to be ashamed of,” Martha said, then burst into laughter at the sight of Sam’s outraged face. Jenny, also laughing, began scrubbing Sam’s back. “Good God!” Martha said, “he’s white!” Which only caused more merriment as Sam’s misery plunged to a new low because Martha, shuddering with pretended horror, had picked up his clothes and dumped them into a bucket of cold water. She picked up his coat last. “Red coats,” she said disdainfully, “are worn only by dancing-masters and ill-bred Carolinians.”

  “We taught your George Washington to dance, didn’t we?” Sam said belligerently, then was forced to seize the stiff brush from Jenny before she plunged it embarrassingly deep. At least the soap and grime in the water were saving his modesty now. “It ain’t fair,” he said.

  “Maltreated Sam.” Martha smiled. “Nice Sam. What on earth are you doing in the army, Sam?”

  “Fighting you lot.”

  Martha laughed. “Do you like it?”

  Sam considered his answer. He had liked it well enough before Nate had died, and he supposed, now that the pain of his brother’s death was receding, that he was liking it still. Better to be Captain Vane’s servant than Sergeant Scammell’s target. A week before, exercising the young stallion, Sam had met his old company returning from duty on the marshes. Maggie, they said, had fled into the wild unknown, and Scammell blamed Sam for it. Sam had avoided the Sergeant, but he knew that one day a confrontation must be endured.

  “Well?” Martha insisted. “Do you like it?”

  “Ain’t bad,” Sam said, but without much conviction. “As long as you don’t get shot.”

  “You can’t always order that happy event, can you? Jonathon couldn’t.”

  “He was daft as lights!” Sam said. “Why did he go off and fight? He’s rich. He could have had everything! So he scarpers off to ge
t a bullet in his leg!”

  “You think it’s more important to be rich than honourable?” Martha asked.

  “That, ma’am, is a question that only a rich person would ask.”

  “Very good, Sam.” Martha unwrapped the precious liquorice root and dropped it into a pot. Suffused with hot water it was a valuable specific against the fever. “Were there any Keyser’s Pills?”

  “No, ma’am. I was lucky to get the liquorice.”

  “Damn you British,” Martha said mildly. “Jonathon will be dead before you get supplies into Philadelphia!”

  “No, he won’t.” Sam surrendered the brush back to an impatient Jenny. “They’re going to take the forts the day after tomorrow, so the river will be open before the week’s end. I’ll get you Keyser’s Pills by next week, I promise.”

  Martha stared at him, but Sam was oblivious of her sudden alertness. He was beginning to detect an odd pleasure in this equally odd situation. He reclined in the high-backed tub while Jenny scrubbed between his toes.

  “The day after tomorrow?” Martha asked innocently.

  “Hessians are crossing the river and the grenadiers are attacking the one on the island. The Captain’s going, so I suppose I’ll have to keep him alive.”

  Martha stared at Sam. “How do you know this, Sam?”

  “Everyone knows!” Sam repeated Tom Evans’ scornful answer, which, in all innocence, Sam believed.

  “Do they indeed?” Martha walked behind Sam to start untangling the flour-matted queue of his hair. Oddly Sam found her touch far more embarrassing than Jenny’s more intimate ministrations, and was glad when, with a shudder, Martha finally extricated the greasy leather pad about which the queue was bound. “But who told you, Sam?”

  “Billy’s servant.” Sam had picked the nickname up from his master.

  “So it’s only gossip?”

  “No!” Sam said indignantly. “The Captain’s been scribbling for days now. Orders, I suppose. And all behind a locked door!”

  “He never said anything to me,” Martha said ruefully. “Nor did Sir William …” Her voice tailed away as she perceived, with an absolute conviction in the accuracy of her perception, how a great deception was being practised on the city.

  Suspecting from Martha’s silence that perhaps, contrary to Tom Evans’ assertion, not everyone knew, Sam turned in alarm.

  Martha saw his concern and divined it accurately. “Don’t worry, Sam. I won’t tell the Captain you said anything.”

  “You won’t, ma’am?”

  “Not a word. God bless you, Samuel Gilpin.” And, to Sam’s astonishment, the Widow Crowl stooped and gave him a swift kiss on a newly cleaned forehead. He blushed, but Martha nodded to Jenny who, grinning, yanked Sam’s feet upwards. At the same moment Martha thrust down on his scalp so that his head was forced under water. He bellowed, got a mouthful of soapy filth, then came up streaming and protesting. Jenny attacked his hair with a brush to drag out the thick detritus of powder, candle grease, sweat, and grime.

  “You’re a royalist?” Martha, abandoning the mystery of Captain Vane’s secretive behaviour, nodded towards Sam’s upper left arm on which, in bold colours, the royal coat-of-arms was tattooed.

  “Of course I am!” Sam said.

  “Why?”

  And Sam tried, between having his face splashed with water, to describe the safety of England’s countryside, the cosiness of a place where each man had his liberty within a framework of due order. Sam worked for the Squire, who deferred to an earl in the next parish, who had the ear of a duke, who would sometimes walk arm-in-arm with the King at Windsor. “We had a fellow condemned to hang,” Sam spoke of a man in his village who had been convicted of horse-stealing, “but the King pardoned him. The Squire and Rector wrote a letter, and the King let him live!”

  “Good old George,” Martha said gently. “But Sam Gilpin could never be squire, could he? Or earl? Or duke?”

  “They said I’d be head coachman if I hadn’t taken the shilling.”

  “Oh!” Martha pretended to be hugely impressed. “Whereas here, Sam Gilpin, there’ll be a market for a man who knows horses and coaches and harness. There’s money to be made, Sam!” She smiled. “Golden hair, who would have believed it?” Martha crossed the room and fetched a huge cotton sheet. She ordered Sam’s clothes to be thoroughly scrubbed and for Sam himself to stop being idiotic, to stand up, and to wrap himself in the sheet. “You haven’t got anything Jenny and I haven’t seen before. There’s clothes on the dresser, Sam. They belonged to my late lamented husband, so they’ll be a loose fit, but you can wear them till your uniform’s dry.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you’ll take the liquorice up to Jonathon?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And Lydia wants one of your dreadful bedtime stories if you can bear her company.”

  “It’ll be a pleasure, ma’am.”

  “I’d be grateful.” Martha paused at the door. “I’d do it myself, but I have to write a letter. Is Captain Vane calling tonight?”

  “Dunno, ma’am. He’s with Billy.”

  “I have a free night?” Martha said it mockingly, then left, and Sam waited till Jenny’s back was turned before he scrambled out of the tub and seized the cotton sheet. He went into the scullery to dress and came out grumbling. “I feel like a plucked chicken.”

  “No one ever died by being clean, Sam.” Jenny, mistress in her own kitchen, elbowed him out of the way. “And you’re a goodlooking boy, you don’t want to waste it! Look at you in those clothes! You look like a King!”

  Sam grinned sheepishly. It had been over three years since he had worn civilian clothes, but now he was in shirt, breeches, and stockings that had once belonged to a lawyer. The clean material on a clean skin felt strange, but not unwelcome. His hair was shining, and Jenny made him turn round so she could tie it with a black bow like any gentleman might wear. “You look good enough to cook!” Jenny offered happily. “Now go and see Master Jonathon!”

  Jonathon, lying in the wide bed, did not even recognize Sam at first, but smiled as soon as he heard the voice. “What have they done to you?”

  “Primped me up like a filly going to market, haven’t they? How are you?”

  Jonathon was pale, thin, and a sheen of sweat covered his face. The room stank because the cauterized stump still suppurated. “I can feel my missing foot. It hurts.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It wasn’t much of a foot, was it?”

  “I’ve seen better,” Sam said, then, walking round the bottom of the bed, suddenly stopped. He stared at himself in a tall looking-glass that was built into the door of a linen press. “Bloody hell fire.”

  Jonathon grimaced with amusement. “Sam, Sam, gentleman.”

  Sam was staring at a tall, well-built man with golden hair and a strong, cheerful face. He turned to admire his profile, then laughed at his vanity. “If my mother could see me now!”

  “She’ll see you one day.”

  “Maybe.” Sam suddenly thought of his poor mother’s grief when, in a few weeks’ time, she would learn of a son dead. He plucked at the white shirt. “Not like a red coat, eh?”

  “It’s better.”

  Sam abandoned his own reflection. “You need cleaning?”

  Jonathon shook his head. “Jenny did it earlier. Tell me what’s happening?”

  So Sam sat by the bed and retailed the news of the city. How a cavalry colonel had been thrown out of a house, stark-naked, and been pursued by an irate husband. He talked of the patrols that tried to keep the thieves and drunks off the streets at night. He tried to describe the previous night’s dancing under the trees at the Neck where, to his chagrin, Sam had been conscripted as a steward. “I hate doing that. All fancied up just to pour wine for a load of drunks.”

  “You’d rather be fighting?”

  “That’s proper soldiering, isn’t it?”

  “It seems odd, somehow, you being the enemy.”

 
; Sam shrugged. “I’m not, am I? Not till you’re back and fighting.” That was Sam’s promise, the dream that he offered Jonathon.

  It was a dream Jonathon liked, but he was losing faith rapidly. “I’m still a prisoner. They’ll never let me out of the city, will they?” He stopped, turning his head on the pillow towards the sound of voices on the stairs, and Sam, hearing Martha’s voice, wondered what new indignity was to be heaped upon him.

  No indignity. Instead, following Martha into the bedroom, came a smiling golden-haired girl who held up a round cardboard box. “Keyser’s Pills! Grandfather found them.”

  “Caroline!” Jonathon reached both hands towards her and Sam watched as the girl bent to kiss the wounded boy.

  And Sam, still watching, understood why Nate had been willing to risk all for a girl.

  This girl was far more beautiful than Maggie. This was a wild-looking golden girl with blue eyes and a firm set to her face that spoke of strength and determination, but who at the moment showed only joy for being with Jonathon. “We found the pills in Grandmother’s bible-box,” Caroline said.

  “Your pills and Sam’s liquorice.” Jonathon’s excitement had put a wash of colour into his cheeks. “That’s Sam.”

  “Don’t be fooled by his clothes,” Martha said drily. “He’s really a tyrannical monster come to enslave us. This is Miss Caroline Fisher, Sam.” Martha paused. “She’s going to marry Jonathon.”

  “I had heard.” Sam grinned at Jonathon who had spoken so often of this girl.

  Caroline smiled at Sam. “You’re the one who’s been so kind to Jonathon. Thank you.”

  “I haven’t done much.” Sam was bashful. “I keep saying he’ll be dancing in a month. Right down Market Street and back, ain’t that so, Jonathon?”

  “I never could dance,” Jonathon said.

  “You just hop to the music,” Sam said, “and I’ll carve you a wooden peg.”

  “Pegleg!” Caroline laughed.

  “There was a fellow in our village with a wooden leg,” Sam said. “He used to dance up a storm!”

  “Never!” Caroline said.