Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  A late carriage splashed past the alley, its lanterns showing mudspattered horses and dripping trace chains. Caroline recognized the Galloways’ equipage. Many of the city’s merchants would no longer attend Sir William’s hedonistic receptions which offended Philadelphia’s sturdy and protestant soul. Caroline merely despised such frivolities which only made her more grimly determined that the British should be defeated. Martha Crowl attended the parties, of course, but to Caroline the Widow was an exotic creature who went her own way in life. “Two hundred and ninety-nine,” she counted, “three hundred.” Caroline readied herself, hoping that Sam had counted at the same speed as herself.

  Sam was in another alley; one that debouched into Market Street almost directly opposite the front of Abel Becket’s big house. It was almost ten o’clock, yet the street was far from dark. Sam, for once, carried no lit torch as a protection, but the pitchsoaked links bracketed outside the city’s main guardhouse flickered shadows on the rain-battered street. The deepest shadows were thrown by the bright lanterns which hung outside Sir William Howe’s house, and before which the rain slanted in heavy silver streaks. It was like the days before the flood itself; rain and more rain, rain that drummed on the roofs of the carriages that waited to take Sir William’s guests home, rain that sluiced down gutters, that flooded the streets, and soaked Sam to the marrow of his bones.

  He counted to three hundred, took a deep breath, and stepped out of the alley.

  Sam’s first stone smashed a pane of glass in a window of Abel Becket’s parlour. The thrown missile thumped against the closed shutter inside the window thereby provoking a woman’s scream. The second stone clattered uselessly on the limestone wall between the windows, the third shattered the fanlight above the front door, while the fourth struck the door just as it was snatched open by a servant.

  Sam ducked back into the alley. The footsteps of a patrol drawn by the sound of breaking glass slopped through muck and mud as their torchflames made grotesque dancing shadows in the street. But Sam, having drawn Abel Becket’s household away from the rear of the big home, had fled in the darkness to wait for Caroline.

  Sam’s evening had begun at Martha’s house where he had given Caroline the beestings, then taken her to the alley behind Abel Becket’s stable yard. Sam had thought to bring an old horse blanket which, before he went to break windows, he had folded, then thrown across the shards of glass that were cemented into the wall’s top. Now, hearing the crash of breaking windows, Caroline jumped to hook an arm over the thickly folded wool. A spike of broken glass spiked through layers of cloth and tore her flesh. She hissed with the pain, but tried to ignore it as she scrabbled her boots for purchase on the wet bricks. Her hand found a grip and she pulled herself safely up. She wore a heavy haversack at her belt that made the climb awkward. Blood trickled warm on her forearm.

  She perched for an uncertain moment, then jumped down into the space behind the stables. Dogs, disturbed by the breaking glass, were barking in every yard on the street, and the bitch chained outside Abel Becket’s feedstore snarled at the black shadow that suddenly materialized in its territory. Caroline fumbled in the haversack then threw the beast the quarter leg of mutton that Sam had stolen for just this purpose. The dog smelt the meat, snapped at it, and Caroline fondled the bitch and waited until it licked her hand in a sign of acceptance. Abel Becket’s carriage horses stamped behind their bolted doors.

  Caroline paused for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness in the yard, then, swathed and shawled in disguising black, she ran to the smokehouse and pulled herself on to its sloping tiled roof. Her boots slipped once, but the thick metal chimney gave her a purchase as she explored the sash window that opened from the servants’ stairway.

  The window was locked as Martha had warned it would be. Caroline slipped her knife’s blade between the two sashes and tugged at the metal latch. It seemed much harder than the window in Martha’s house on which Caroline had practised, and the rain made her knife handle slippery. For a second Caroline felt despair, then the latch reluctantly yielded to the blade’s pressure. The sash weights thumped and echoed as she pushed the window up. A canvas curtain inside billowed fierce from the wet wind, then subsided as Caroline, safe inside, pulled the window shut. She stood still, the knife in her hand, and listened.

  Voices, alarmed and drawn by the broken window glass, shouted from the front of the house, and a clatter of pans sounded from the kitchen at the foot of the stairwell, but there was no sound close to Caroline. The blood had reached her wrist. She wiped it on her thick skirt and, in the darkness, climbed the uncarpeted steps.

  A pale chink of light betrayed the landing door. Caroline fumbled for the lever, pressed it, and flinched as the hinges squealed. But no one saw her and no alarm was raised as she sidled into the corridor. She could hear a man’s voice downstairs explaining that drunks must have been responsible for the broken windows and that if Mr Becket cared to submit a bill to the duty officer at the city guardhouse then such a bill would be received most sympathetically.

  Caroline, dripping water and blood on to the deep carpet, crossed the corridor and opened Jonathon’s door. She almost recoiled from the fetid smell of sickness. As she stepped into the room, Caroline knew she smelt imminent death.

  The last time she had seen Jonathon the boy had been mending fast. The pain from his stump had gone, he had been putting on weight, and colour had come back to his cheeks. Now Jonathon looked weaker than a new-born kitten. He shivered as he slept, sweated as he shivered, and his skin was a sickly yellow-white in the light of the single shielded candle that burned on a dresser beside the bed.

  “Jonathon? Jonathon?” Caroline whispered the name as she unslung the rain-soaked haversack and put it on the bed. “Jonathon?” She could see scars of clotted blood on Jonathon’s arm; square after square of scabs that made a strangely regular pattern. She put her hand on Jonathon’s forehead and was astonished by the heat she felt. “Jonathon?”

  Jonathon’s eyes flickered open, closed, then opened again. He stared at her, and it seemed to Caroline that he did not recognize her.

  “Jonathon?” She smiled at him, feeling such a welling of pity that tears started at her eyes. “It’s Caroline.”

  “Dreaming.” Jonathon’s voice, thanks to the quinsy, was like a rasp on stone.

  “You’re not dreaming, Jonathon. I’m here!” And now Caroline was crying because the look on his face was so relieved and so astonished and so pleased that she felt as if her heart was being torn in two. She held him, and her cheek felt the fierce, feverburning heat of his face. He was saying her name over and over again, sobbing it in disbelief and joy.

  Caroline gently pulled herself away. “You have to sit up.”

  Jonathon frowned. “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can.” She put her arm under Jonathon and lifted him, noting how little he weighed. “What are they doing to you?”

  “That thing.” Jonathon, in a gesture so feeble that it could not have stirred a butterfly’s wing, indicated some strange device that stood beside a bible on a chest beneath the window. Caroline ignored the odd implement for the moment, propping Jonathon on the bolster and pillows instead. She saw how the bedsheets and blankets were stained from the daily blood-letting and she felt a surge of fury that he should have been reduced to this pathetic weakness by the doctors. Yet not so weak that he could not suddenly laugh. “You came!”

  “Of course I came. I tried before, but your uncle’s servants wouldn’t let me in.” Caroline was talking just above a whisper as she unbuckled the knapsack and took out the wrapped cup and the canteen.

  “I …” but whatever Jonathon wanted to say was drowned by an awful, racking cough. He fought for breath afterwards, his thin chest heaving beneath the red flannel that had been wrapped round his ribs. “I’m dying.”

  “You’re not dying,” Caroline said stoutly. “You’re going back to the army!” She was pouring the first of the beestings into the cup
.

  “And you?” Jonathon asked.

  Caroline knew what he wanted. “I’ll come with you. But only if you drink this!”

  Jonathon rolled his head away from the beestings to stare at the shutters. The light of the watch torches flared there, and men’s voices were loud on the pavement beneath. “What’s happening?”

  “Sam broke some windows so I could get into the house. Head up, now!”

  Jonathon obeyed. Caroline very carefully supported the back of his head and held the cup to his lips. His black hair was soaked with sweat. “Drink it all now.” It was like tending a child.

  Jonathon, trusting her, drained the cup. It took a long time, for his throat was swollen with disease. He grimaced at the last drop, then watched as Caroline poured more of the creamy yellow liquid into the cup. “What is it?”

  “Sam’s magic,” Caroline said. “Mare’s beestings. More now!” She held the cup to Jonathon’s lips again, then wiped the trickles from the heated skin. “Last bit!” She poured the dregs from the canteen into the cup and made Jonathon finish them. “That wasn’t bad, was it?”

  Jonathon, exhausted by the tiny effort of drinking the beestings, shivered as Caroline helped him down into the bed again. He held her hand, gripping it as though he would never let go. “What day is it?”

  “I don’t know. Wednesday? You don’t want to worry about days, Jonathon. Just about getting better.” She leaned over to the chest and, with her free hand, picked up the odd metal device. “What is it?”

  “A scarificator.”

  “Scarificator?”

  “A bleeding machine.” Jonathon looked with hatred at the device which, to Caroline, resembled an oversize nutmeg grater. It was a steel box, three inches square, with a handle protruding from one face while the opposite face was pierced with holes like a colander. There was a trigger on the handle, just behind a small lever which Caroline, taking her right hand from Jonathon’s fevered grip and, exactly as if she were cocking a musket, pulled back.

  “Hold it away from your other hand.” Jonathon’s voice was weak, but his breathing was easier.

  Caroline obeyed and, with some trepidation, pulled the trigger. The implement jumped like a snapping mousetrap in her hand as a dozen symmetrically arranged blades, each wickedly sharp and shaped like a gouge, sprang through the holes. Each small blade was stained with dark clotted blood and Caroline understood now the regular patterns of scars on Jonathon’s arm. The machine was a device for bleeding patients, drawing the blood in one quick and multiple sting of pain. “They’re barbarians,” Caroline said.

  “It’s the very latest thing from London.”

  “They’re not using it on you again.” Caroline pushed the scarificator into the pocket of her skirt.

  “They’ll be angry if it’s lost,” Jonathon said.

  “You think they’ll blame you? You have to defy them!”

  “I don’t feel very defiant now.” He lay exhausted, his hand seeking hers again. His voice, when he spoke, was almost drowned by the harsh tattoo of rain on the windows. “Do you think I’ll ever leave?”

  “You’ll leave,” Caroline said, and she began to tell him of the preparations she had made. She had cooked some portable soup – a broth dried to solidity that could be soaked back into soup in hot water and which kept for ever. Sam would help them find horses so that she and Jonathon could ride north to join Washington’s army. She made her words sound hopeful, trying to offer Jonathon a cause to make true.

  “I can’t ride,” Jonathon said.

  “You can! We can’t get the boat past the rapids until the river settles down in spring, so we’ll have to ride if you want to go soon. Anyway, there was a rector in a village near Sam who only had one leg. Sam said he rode sidesaddle. That’s what you’ll do!”

  “My uncle won’t let me go.”

  “He won’t know, will he? If I can get in here, then I can get you out. And you’ll get better, Jonathon. Sam says everyone gets better after beestings.”

  “How is Sam?”

  “He wishes he could see you.”

  Caroline stayed with Jonathon till he slept. Once there were footsteps close outside the door, but no one came in. Caroline, stroking Jonathon’s forehead and trying to put some of her own strength into this boy to whom she had promised her life, waited till the clock in the hall struck the half-past eleven. Then, very gently, she kissed his hot forehead. He murmured in his sleep, but did not wake. She left him the carved ivy cup as a reminder of the stolen visit.

  Candlelight flickered from the open stairwell at the end of the corridor as Caroline slipped across, then she was on the dark servants’ stairs. She went down to the window, eased it up, and climbed into the seething rain that drummed on tiles and shingles and flagged yards.

  The bitch recognized Caroline and licked her hand. Caroline, fearing the wall’s broken glass, went to the wide carriage entry and unbolted the small door that was let into one of the big, spiked gates. She pulled it open and stepped into the utter darkness of the shadowed alley.

  “Caroline!” The voice was Sam’s, and it was a strangled and desperate voice. “Run! Run!”

  Then the shadows took form, moved, and the threat of the darkness overwhelmed her.

  Twenty-Seven

  Having thrown the stones, Sam had dodged down the alley, turned left towards Fourth Street, and there had slid into the shadow of the entrance to a bookseller’s shop. Across the street, and illuminated by torches that hissed in the rain, the provosts had found an unlicensed grogshop. Barrels and bottles were being tossed on to the pavement, and disconsolate soldiers and sailors were being marched south towards the Pest House Quay where they would be locked into waterlogged cells for the night. Sam, if he was discovered on the streets without a torch, would receive the same treatment.

  In an upper room above a furnituremaker’s further down Fourth Street a group of officers were making music. Some played flutes and violins, the rest sang, and Sam listened to the delicate music as the fighting and shouting from the grogshop died away. An unshuttered window in the musicians’ room cast a dim wash of candlelight on to the rain falling in a silvery spray on the pavement. A legless civilian swung past the bookseller’s doorway on muscular arms, then splashed grotesquely through the roadway’s thick mud. Two women, sheltering like Sam in another shop doorway, laughed briefly. The provosts, hearing them, went to do business with bottles of confiscated rum as payment.

  Sam waited a half-hour. Then, when the street was empty of provosts or patrols, he slipped into the rain and ran north. He crossed Market, sprinting through the mud for fear of the sentries outside the guardhouse, then slipped into the alley that ran behind the college. He could just see the dim shape of the horse blanket on the wall’s glass-trapped coping to tell him that Caroline was still inside the Becket house. No noise of protest came from the house so, shivering in the cold rain, he backed into the arched gate of the college to wait for Caroline.

  The movement was sudden beside him, flickering in the shadowed shelter of the gateway, and Sam, expecting a blow, twisted hard away, bounced off the gatepost, and came back fighting.

  A musket butt slammed into his belly, and a second man, coming from another entranceway, jabbed another reversed musket into Sam’s head, knocking his hat off.

  Sam slipped, fell, and a boot thudded into his thigh. He pushed up, hands reaching into the darkness, and again a musket butt swung at him. This time the dark night exploded scarlet and white as a musket thumped his skull. He could hear his assailants breathing and grunting, then a heavy man dropped on him. A knee was pushed into Sam’s belly and a bayonet was sudden and cold at his throat.

  “One word, Sam, and you’re fucking dead.”

  Sam kept silent. His head was spinning, and his eyes playing tricks with light in the blackness. The pain in his skull was dreadful, but he was not so dazed that he did not recognize Sergeant Michael Scammell’s voice. “Who’s the whore, Sam?”

  “Whore?�
��

  The bayonet shifted at Sam’s throat, breaking the skin. Scammell chuckled. “You came here an hour ago with a whore. You left, she went over the wall, and now you’re waiting for her. Robbing the gentry, are you?”

  “She lives here.”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Sam!” Scammell hissed the words. Whoever helped the Sergeant crouched by Sam’s side, the musket raised ready to crack down on Sam’s skull if he should try and heave Scammell off his belly. Sam’s head was in the mud, held there by the bayonet. “I don’t care about your whore,” Scammell said. “Only about mine. And you was seen in the street with Maggie a couple of weeks back. I’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since, Sam.” Scammell chuckled. “She works for a Mrs Taylor, doesn’t she?”

  “Dunno, Sarge.”

  “You know, Sam! And I know. Elliott was there, wasn’t he? Three guineas he paid! Three guineas! I want that money, Sam, and you’re going to get it for me, because she’s mine, boy.” Scammell’s voice hissed above Sam in the darkness. “She’s mine! She was nothing when I met her, nothing. A bull whore that I made into a guinea girl. You understand me, boy? She’s mine.”

  And if Scammell found Maggie again, Sam thought, then her price would soon drop back to the five shillings. Sam’s head, though still hurting like the devil, was clearing. He could see the dark shapes of the two men above him, but Sam took a shred of hope because his right boot had found a purchase on a sprung plank of the door beside him. He braced himself, ready to heave, but knowing he must bide his time until the right opportunity came. Even then, he thought, he was unlikely to escape both men. He wondered who Scammell’s helper was, then knew he had to somehow keep Scammell talking until some chance, however slim, occurred. “Maggie doesn’t want you, Sarge.”