Redcoat

by Bernard Cornwell

  The last merchantmen had sailed to England. There was still trade between the city and New York, and southwards to the Caribbean, but winter threatened to end all navigation between Philadelphia and the sea. The smaller streams froze, the river’s edge seemed daily more sluggish, while the grasses on the empty marshlands were frosted into stiff white spikes. Lord Howe took the fleet north to the deeper, safer anchorage of Rhode Island, leaving only a handful of small warships to fend off the rebel gunboats that still sometimes snapped at the shrunken seagoing trade.

  The city’s mood grew bleaker with the cold. The merchants must wait for their cargoes, sent to London, to yield profits for the next year. Some of the merchants were already ruined, their cargoes wrecked on the rebel obstacles that were yet to be entirely cleared from the river bed. Some Whig citizens, despairing of Philadelphia’s future, put their goods to auction and left the city before the snow and ice turned discomfort into misery.

  Most of Sir William’s men were still bivouacked outside the city limits, crowded into huts that disfigured the land around the Centre Commons, but the quartermasters were already searching the streets for empty houses and shops that would serve as winter quarters. The citizens feared for the time when the great mass of Hessians and Redcoats, along with their women, would flood into the city proper. Food was already scarce, and fuel for fires scarcer. It had not been like this, people said, when the rebels had ruled Philadelphia.

  Yet the greatest outcry against Sir William’s rule came when he ordered the sequestration of a dozen of the city’s churches. All but one were dissenting churches, and the order brought a delegation of ministers, deacons and laymen to the army’s headquarters. There were Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Seceders, Baptists, a gloomy minister of the German Reformed Church who spoke no English, two Anglicans, and three Quakers who, though their meeting house was not threatened, came to protest against the tide of ungodliness that now flooded Philadelphia.

  Sir William offered tea, small talk, then gently told the city’s righteous that their churches were to be turned into stables.

  “Stabling?” A Presbyterian, famed for his anti-British sentiments, stared with outrage at Sir William. “Horses in God’s houses? You can use empty warehouses for stabling!”

  Sir William, who was attended by Christopher Vane, sighed patiently. “Horses need stalls. They can’t just roam around, they’re not sheep! Your church has box pews, I believe? Box pews make splendid horse stalls. And horses need large doors. No, I fear it has to be the churches!” Sir William smiled affably at his audience who, dressed sober as crows, stared back with undisguised hostility.

  Abel Becket, who had come with the Revd MacTeague because St Paul’s was the one Anglican church marked for desecration, pointed out that the South Street Playhouse had long been disused for the drama thanks to the pressure of godly men in the city and was now empty. It had been used as a hospital for wounded officers who had either recovered or been buried, and surely, Becket pleaded, such a building could be used for stabling. “It would spare one house of God, Sir William.”

  “It might,” Sir William allowed, “but you would be even more unhappy, gentlemen, if I were to stage plays in one of your churches.”

  “Plays?” The Presbyterian sniffed the sulphurous presence of the devil in his city.

  “But of course! The winter is the time for diversions.” Sir William smiled. “And I was ever taught, gentlemen, that though prayers can be well said without a church, the drama cannot be decently spoken without a stage.”

  After the meeting, which went about as miserably as he had expected, the Commander-in-Chief politely showed his guests to the outer hallway. Christopher Vane fell into step with Abel Becket. “May I ask how your nephew does, sir?”

  Becket, disgruntled by the meeting, seemed in a churlish mood, but his news was surprisingly good. It seemed that Jonathon was mending with remarkable speed.

  “Remarkable indeed!” MacTeague had overheard the answer, and now turned to Vane. “It demonstrates the healing effects of a loving home and much prayer. Jonathon now takes solid food and even essays exercises on his flute.”

  “I’m so very pleased,” Vane said. “It proves how right we were to move him.” Jonathon’s recovery had become the touchstone of victory between Vane and the Widow. “I trust,” Vane said to the Revd MacTeague, “that you will mark the young man’s deliverance with prayer on Sunday?”

  “In a stable?” MacTeague asked, then, because he had been promised a generous rent for the sequestration of his church, he nodded. “Such prayers will be offered. You may be sure that Jonathon’s happy redemption will be proclaimed.”

  Vane saw that Sir William had been cornered by a Presbyterian and a Baptist who were rudely demanding to know if an adequate food supply could be ensured for the next three months. Vane turned to Becket. “And your nephew is seeing the error of his former ways, sir?”

  “He will, he will!” Becket said forcefully. “He can expect no part of his patrimony if he does not take the oath of loyalty, Captain.”

  “If there’s any help I can give?” Vane suggested, then turned because the Baptist minister, whose voice was as harsh as a corncrake, was berating the Commander-in-Chief. “You’re imprisoned in the city,” the Baptist said, “you’re cornered by Patriots, Sir William, and we’ll starve unless you go!”

  “We’re hardly imprisoned.” Sir William was determined to keep his temper.

  “I call it imprisoned!” the Baptist said. “And unless you take more care of the Lord’s commandments, Sir William, then His wrath will smite you!”

  Sir William, in an attempt to rid himself of his unwanted guests, opened the front door himself. A small snow was falling, though not settling.

  The Revd MacTeague, eager to be seen as a more civilized man than his Baptist colleague, chuckled. “I pray that you smite Mister Washington, Sir William.”

  “In this weather?”

  The Baptist gave a harsh laugh. “It does not seem to deter Mister Washington?”

  Sir William had to fight back an irritated retort. He had lived long enough in America to know how blunt the colonists could be, even when talking to their betters, and he knew the priests expressed a concern that worried every Loyalist in the city. The rebel army, forsaking its winter quarters and reinforced with men come from their triumph at Saratoga, had marched close to the city, perhaps hoping to tempt Sir William into battle, or perhaps making a show of defiance to prove that the British were imprisoned within their own lines. Abel Becket expressed a wish that the rebel defiance be punished, but Sir William offered him no hope. “It’s December, Mr Becket. Winter is not, nor ever has been, the fighting season.”

  Sir William finally closed the door on the delegation, then groaned with an exaggerated despair. “American preachers almost persuade me that this is a barbaric country. Ignorance allied to passion, Kit, is a dangerous conjunction. Perhaps we should win this war just to save America from its preachers?” Sir William chuckled to show that he did not want the words taken seriously, then reported in the city and hurled vengefully back from the rabid pulpits.

  Vane crossed to warm himself at the hallway’s fire. “Let’s just hope they believe you, sir.”

  For Sir William was again attempting to deceive the gossips and spies within the city. Winter might not be the fighting season, but late on the very next night, 4 December, beneath a starlit darkness in which the moon was suspended like a sliver of hard white metal, the army marched. The battalions followed the frost-hardened road through the Northern Liberties, passing the defensive redoubts where torches, lighting the guardposts, revealed pinched and cold faces. The soldiers carried four days’ food on their backs and a battle’s-worth of cartridges in their cartouches.

  The guns crunched the frosted earth under iron-rimmed wheels while the cavalry sought more level ground at the road’s edges. Company after company, squadron after squadron, battery after battery, all marched north from Philadelphia i
n a freezing night beneath stars that were a million diamond points in blackness.

  Sir William, cloaked and scarfed and gloved against the bitter cold, rode behind the leading brigade. He dreamed of surprising the enemy, a dream that his second-in-command, Lord Cornwallis, rudely dispelled. “You ordered the city’s bakers to make forty thousand loaves of ration bread! You think Washington hasn’t heard of that ten times over? Twenty times? The damn city’s thick with spies!”

  Sir William ascribed Lord Cornwallis’s choleric tone to the aggravations of the freezing night. He found his second-in-command a difficult man to endure. Undoubtedly Cornwallis was energetic and able, but Sir William sometimes felt that his lordship’s very existence was an implicit criticism of himself.

  “If you hung a few of the malcontents,” Cornwallis went on, “it might discourage the rest. Nothing like a few bodies on a gibbet to remind people of their loyalty.”

  “A victory would be a more salutary lesson,” Sir William said mildly. As ever when action was imminent, he became optimistic. The war might have broken Sir William’s dreams and even driven him to offer his resignation, but he had never been defeated on a battlefield. And he saw the wisdom of his brother’s advice. If George Washington could be broken on the icy wheel of a surprise attack, then the French would shrink from joining a lost cause and the rebellion’s leaders would seek for the peace that Sir William so earnestly desired and in search of which Sir William marched north at dead of night, hoping to fall like a thunderbolt in the winter’s dawn. Perhaps this time his victory would be complete and the French would be so dazzled by the thunderbolt’s flames that they would keep their troops safe home in France.

  Except that, at three in the morning, when the leading battalions reached a small ridge, they saw a band of light stretching across their front. Camp fires blazed in darkness, a thick row of fires, mile upon mile of flames, and yet more fires flared bright as signal guns warned the rebel army of the British approach.

  “Ready and waiting,” Cornwallis said with the satisfaction of a man whose doom-laden prophecy had been proved right.

  “And doubtless fearful of us,” Sir William said mildly.

  “So attack, sir! Attack!”

  But the thunderbolt hesitated. Sir William knew what chaos could come in night fighting, nor did he wish to thrust his brave men down the moon- and frost-whitened roads until he could see just what reception the enemy might have prepared for them. “We shall wait for dawn.”

  “March up the road now,” Cornwallis urged, “and take them with the bayonet!”

  “At dawn.”

  But at dawn Sir William saw that the Americans, clearly warned, had built earthern fortifications on their ridge and barred the roads with sharp-staked abatis.

  “We can break through!” Cornwallis urged.

  “I’ve no doubt we can,” Sir William said, “but at what price? There’ll be no replacements for our casualties, none! Every man who dies here is a gift to the enemy. We shall let Mister Washington attack us.”

  But Mister Washington, mindful of his defeats at Sir William’s hands, would not leave his fortifications. For two days the two sides waited. Plumes of smoke smeared the sky behind the British lines as forage parties, coming across small farms, looted and burned. The frost limned the trees a delicate and brilliant white until a cold rain, starting on the second day, drenched the ice from stark black December branches.

  On the third day new supplies came from the city and Sir William cautiously probed to his right. “I can’t batter through without grievous losses,” he told his aides, “so we shall manoeuvre him into disaster.”

  Hopes rose that afternoon. General Washington, seeing British cavalry isolated on the Bethlehem Road, ordered the Pennsylvania militia to attack.

  But the cavalry was not isolated. Two battalions of Redcoats guarded the flank and for ten minutes the two bodies of infantry exchanged musket fire, then the British fixed their bayonets. They advanced in a silent and menacing close order, and the rebel militia retreated. A few American muskets banged smoke over the hard earth, a few red-coated men dropped from the ranks, but still the long blades came forward. The militia was not trained to face such attacks and their fear of the blades turned retreat into flight.

  But the British did not follow and there was silence again on a battlefield. Crows pecked at the dead who had been stripped of their uniforms. Sir William still probed cautiously to the east, but he neither found a route about the enemy’s flank, nor could he tempt the rebels out of their positions into the open ground where superior British training might decimate the enemy.

  “We shall go back to the city,” Sir William announced after a third day’s fruitless manoeuvring.

  “We’ll do what, sir?” Christopher Vane, the aide in attendance, sounded horrified.

  “It’s too cold to stay any longer.” Sir William shivered on his horse, staring into the bleak landscape.

  “We should attack!” Vane, caution scattered by the cold and by the frustration of these havering days, heard himself lecturing his Commander-in-Chief. “If he lives through this winter, sir, he’ll raise rebel hopes. We have to end him now!”

  “Be careful, Vane!” Sir William, astonished at Vane’s temerity, offered the caution.

  But Vane’s tongue could not be curbed. At last, at long last, the British army had marched to crush the rebels, and now, after days of half-hearted manoeuvring, Sir William would merely march back again. “It will take a thousand deaths, sir!” Vane urged, “but a thousand pages in the history books will tell how you ended a rebellion! If we just slink back we’ll be the laughing stock of every damned Patriot in the city! Attack, sir! He’s far more frightened of us than …” Vane stopped, suddenly knowing he had gone much too far. He shivered, then offered Sir William a self-deprecatory smile. “I apologize, sir. My old loquacity, I fear.”

  But Sir William, staring at his aide in the cold dusk of a winter’s day, would not be mollified. His voice was like ice. “I am not frightened, Captain Vane, and if you have a mind to keep my affection I would be grateful if you would refrain from offering me jejune lectures on the conduct of military operations!” Sir William shuddered, as though he was boiling up for an even more savage outburst, but he managed to control his temper. “Good day, sir!” Sir William twisted his horse away from Vane and for once Vane’s apologies, spoken with his rueful charm, had not worked. He felt the chill of estrangement, but also a surge of resentment that Sir William’s pusillanimity would let George Washington live to fight another year.

  Sir William marched back to Philadelphia and ordered the troops to move into their winter quarters. The old huts by the Centre Commons, deemed too frail for winter’s cruel cold, were torn down and their timbers were either chopped for firewood or made into the bunks which were crammed into every abandoned house. Philadelphia’s population rose sharply. Not only was the army in residence, but refugees from the ravaged hinterland came in search of shelter and food. There was scarce enough of either.

  Only the wealthy did not suffer privation. The shops, replenished by the ships which had sailed upriver after the capture of the forts, offered luxuries to the affluent. Fine spermaceti candles could be had at five shillings a box. Superb false teeth, made with teeth drawn from the corpses of Brandywine and Germantown, were obtainable for eight guineas a set, while watch-chains, court plasters, hair powder, wigs, silk stockings, and pomatum were all plentiful. Wine, brandy, gin, arrack and rum were ever available, yet supplies of cheese, flour, meal, rice and meat were already as scarce as in the weeks before the river forts fell. Prices rose, beggars multiplied, and the lowering, darkening sky threatened the snow that would make the misery worse.

  It was the dead season; a time when the weak things of the earth died, but Jonathon mended.

  Martha heard of her brother’s recovery from servants’ gossip and from the Revd MacTeague. She passed the good news on to Caroline, though Caroline already knew because one of the kitchenmai
ds in Abel Becket’s house now smuggled letters between Caroline and Jonathon.

  “It was Sam’s beestings,” Caroline said.

  “I rather think it was.” Martha heard the pride in the young girl’s voice. “So! Jonathon will be on a wooden leg by spring.” She said it cheerfully to see how Caroline responded.

  The response was not enthusiastic. Instead, Caroline punched at the small logs in the kitchen grate with a poker. “Spring.” She said the word flatly.

  “When the promises come home to roost?”

  Caroline smiled a rueful acknowledgement. “He wants to go to Trenton. He says he’ll clerk for the army. He knows he can’t fight.”

  “And you’ll go with him?”

  Caroline nodded. “I promised.”

  “And your grandparents?”

  Caroline stared at the flames. “They’ve always known I’d have to go one day. Most girls are married at fifteen, aren’t they?” She looked at Martha almost defiantly as she posed the question. “If not earlier!”

  “I suppose they are, yes.”

  “And I can make him very happy.”

  “Yes, you can.” Martha stood and walked to the small window that looked up into her courtyard. Sleet tapped on the pane. “How’s Sam? I haven’t seen him for many a long day.”

  “Sam’s busy. He’s doctoring horses and saving money.”

  Martha heard the warmth in Caroline’s voice that had been absent a moment before. Martha turned. “Do you see Sam often?”

  “Sometimes.” Caroline was evasive.

  Martha went back to the fire and stretched out thin hands to the flames. “Would you like some advice?” She did not wait for an answer, but offered the advice anyway. “It might be best if you stayed on the other side of the river. If I see Sam I’ll tell him you can’t come to the city till the danger of ice is past.”