by Ann Rinaldi
“Do you know how despicable a sneak is?”
A spy. He was a spy for the Americans! My head whirled in dizzy understanding as I looked up at him, standing in front of me, tall and lanky and broad shouldered, still tanned from his trip, his dark good looks spoiled by his anger.
“Answer me!” he snapped.
“Yes, sir.”
“What have I taught you in these last two years about decency and honor? Nothing?”
“I thought—”
“You thought what?”
“I thought you were a Tory.”
“And would that be reason to go into my private papers?”
“No. But you aren’t a Tory. You’re a Patriot, after all. You deceived me.”
“I had to. It’s part of my job. My life depends on it, can you understand that?”
“You mean—”
“I mean that I’ll hang from the highest tree or the nearest gallows if the British find out.”
Published by
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an imprint of
Random House Children’s Books
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Copyright © 1986 by Ann Rinaldi
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eISBN: 978-0-307-78686-9
RL: 6.3
Reprinted by arrangement with the author
v3.1
For my son, RON,
a twentieth-century Patriot
who opened my eyes to my country’s history
Contents
Cover
Map
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
CHAPTER
1
The cold wind stung my face and brought tears to my eyes when I turned into it to look at my brother Dan, who stood next to me on the hill. It seemed like all of Trenton was laid out below us in grays and browns with nothing to recommend it on that cheerless December day. But what we saw was only King and Queen Streets as we stood on the rise where they converged.
“Are you ready, Jem?”
“Yes.”
He handed the musket to me. I could not believe it was so heavy, and for a second I almost dropped it, but then I grabbed it with both hands.
Dan smiled. “Twelve pounds. You sure you still want to do this?”
“You know I do. Don’t tease. Let’s do it before someone sees us. I’m freezing.”
“All right, then, here.” He took his cartridge box from his shoulder and draped it over me. “You won’t be wearing one, of course, but you should always have cartridges made up at the house. I showed you how to do that.”
We’d done it one night when our parents had been out. Dan had been rolling cartridges at the kitchen table, and I’d gotten him to show me how. I’d even rolled some.
“Now hold the musket hip-height or whatever way is comfortable for you to load. All right?”
“Like this?”
“That’s fine. Next, take the cartridge out of the box and tear it apart with your teeth. Go ahead, put it between your teeth. That’s right. You know, a soldier can be deficient in many ways, Jem, but he’s got to have at least two good teeth.”
I ripped the end off the paper cartridge and spat it out. If only I weren’t so cold. If only I could stop shaking. If only the gun weren’t so heavy.
“There’s powder in there now and a musket ball, as you know. So pour some of the powder into the pan. That’s it. That’s enough. Close the hammer.…”
I did.
“Now pour the rest of the powder and the musket ball and the paper wadding into the barrel. Careful. That’s it. Take the ramrod out. Here … This is the ramrod … I’ve told you, Jem!”
“Daniel Emerson, you may have done this hundreds of times.…”
“You’re doing fine, Jem. No girl I know in town would even hold a musket.”
I wasn’t doing fine. The musket was too heavy. I couldn’t keep it all straight in my head, but I would do it. I was determined.
“Now, full-cock the cock. That’s it.”
“I … can’t … get … it … all … the … way … back.”
“Yes, you can. There you go. You’ve got it. Bring it up to your shoulder so you can fire. No, Jem, not on your shoulder, against it. You’ve got to brace it. There, that’s it. Pull the trigger. Go ahead.”
I tried. It wouldn’t go back at first, but Dan was coaxing.
“Steady, hold your feet firm on the ground. Do it, Jem!”
I fired.
The world exploded. The impact almost knocked me over, but Dan steadied me. The noise was deafening. For a moment I couldn’t hear, couldn’t think, and I could almost taste the black powder in my mouth. But I had fired!
Dan took the musket, smiling. “You did fine. But you’ll have to go through the moves a little faster. Do you think you can remember all you have to do?”
“How can she? She can’t even remember to come for her lessons when her tutor is waiting for her.”
He said it plain and quiet, but there, just near the row of trees, was John Reid, my tutor, on his horse. Dan and I turned to stare, speechless. Where had he come from? There had been no one around a moment before. We watched, as if under a spell, as John Reid got off his horse and came toward us.
“I wish you were as attentive with your French, Jemima. I ought to give musket-firing lessons. Then I wouldn’t have to leave a warm fire and hunt you down.”
“I’m sorry, John,” Dan said. “I didn’t know Jem had lessons this afternoon.”
“Lessons are every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoon.” Reid was looking at me, not my brother, as he spoke. His brown eyes bored into me. “You haven’t been home that much, Daniel, so you wouldn’t know.”
“Jem said—”
“Jem lied. A practice she’s been known to indulge in to get her own way.”
“John, I don’t think Jem would—”
“Yes, she would.” Reid turned his steadfast gaze from me to Dan. “She resorts to every sort of trickery she can think of to get out of lessons. And to provoke me. I’m quite used to it. It’s been going on for two years now. But this …”
He stared at the polished and gleaming musket in Dan’s hands. Then he sighed and looked from one of us to the other. “I trust your parents know about this.”
“No, John,” Dan said, “they don’t.” His words carried all the meaning they needed. Their eyes met. They were friends. Reid was four years older than Dan, but his authority over me made those four years seem like ten.
The wind gusted. I drew my blanket coat around me. Reid’s rough brown cloak billowed, making him look imposing and sinister.
“I trust you had good reason for this, then.”
“You know I leave in a month, John. With the war coming …” Now Dan sighed. “In my travels around the county I found many of the menfolk teaching the women to use weapons.”
Reid nodded. “Ah yes, the war. Damned nuisance. It’s all my boys talk about at school. It’s putting strange ideas into the young people’s heads. You know that your brother David is off at the steel mill with John Fitch again this afternoon when he’s supposed to be at his apprenticeship with John Singer.”
“No, I didn’t,” Dan said. “What do they do at the mill?”
“Make gunlocks for the American army.”
“Gunlocks?”
“Yes, gunlocks.” Reid’s boots crunched on the frozen ground as he strode back to his horse. “Which isn’t what Fitch is supposed to be doing there, but what he does nevertheless. And David with him. It seems I spend half my time these days tracking down your errant brother and sister.”
“I’ll fetch David as soon as I leave here,” Dan promised.
“I’d appreciate that. And if it makes you feel any better, I’d probably teach my sister to use a musket, too, if I had a sister. After I birched her first for lying.” He got on his horse and sat, considering us.
“I’ll say nothing to your parents about this. It would only worry them needlessly.”
“Thank you, John.”
“I wasn’t lying, Mr. Reid.” I looked at him.
His eyes softened into familiar mockery. “We’ll discuss it Friday at lessons, Jemima.”
“I wasn’t. Dan and I were to meet here a full hour before lessons. But he was late. And I lost all sense of time.”
“She’s speaking the truth,” Dan said. “I was at the Moores’ and left poor Jem here freezing in the cold.”
“All right, Jemima. I’ll let you off this time. But you’d better concoct some tale to tell your mother. She knows you missed your schoolwork today. Lying shouldn’t be too difficult for you. You’re telling tales all the time.”
He veered his horse toward town, leaving me with the sting of his unkind words. I watched his retreating figure and wondered if he would indeed keep this musket lesson a secret from our parents. And how he knew that John Fitch was making gunlocks at the steel mill. And why it mattered that he had hurt me when I considered him so despicable.
CHAPTER
2
I had an errand to run after leaving Dan, so I hurried along Queen Street. Mrs. Pinkerton was ailing and Mother said I was to deliver a copy of Gulliver’s Travels for her to read. I delivered the book to David Pinkerton’s shop, inquired after his wife’s health, took quick note of the price of his printed calicoes, as Father had asked me to do, and then looked to see if he was still stocking tea.
He was. My father was a merchant too and hadn’t sold tea in his shop since early 1774 when Dan and the other students at the College of New Jersey in Princeton had burned the school’s supply in protest of the tax on tea the British had imposed on us back in 1773. I went back out into the cold, thinking of how dearly the decision not to carry tea must have cost Father. Many people patronized Pinkerton’s shop now instead, and my father had a lot of other difficulties, too. Since October he’d been a member of the Committee of Safety, which meant he had a say not only in the commissioning of military officers for our army but also in how the money should be spent that the legislature issued. And he had to keep an eye on the activities of avowed Tories, those who were loyal to the king, in our town. And many of them were his friends.
“Jemima. Jemima Emerson!”
Up ahead a figure came running toward me. I recognized Raymond Moore instantly in his round, flat-brimmed Quaker hat and somber clothes. The Moore farm, where Dan had been earlier, was two miles outside town. Raymond was the younger of the two sons and always my favorite. We’d played together as children, Dan, David, and I and the Moore children. But in the last year or so, he’d been looking at me with different eyes. I must say his looks quickened my heart, though I was determined it would be a long time before I married.
His parents and mine were friends, in the steadfast but inscrutable way Quakers were friends with people. Dan was just about betrothed to Raymond’s sister, Betsy.
“Hello, Jemima.”
“You would think the devil himself was chasing you, Raymond.”
He stood holding his hat in both hands against his heaving chest. The Moores grew their corn and their sons tall, Father always said. He’d forgotten to add handsome. But Raymond’s handsomeness was obscured by some private anguish.
“I would speak with thee.”
“Fine, you can walk me home.”
“No. Here. We mustn’t let thy parents see us together.”
“Why? Do we have some secret they wouldn’t approve of?”
“Don’t jest. In fact, perhaps we soon shall if I persist in my plan.”
“And what plan is that?”
“My plan to enlist in thy brother’s regiment.”
“Oh, Raymond!” I stopped dead in my shoes. Our eyes met, and in his I saw all the pain and determination of his decision. “Why, Raymond? I don’t want you to go away and fight. Isn’t it enough that Dan is going? And perhaps David too? And almost everyone I know?”
“I have seen thy brother running himself ragged these last six weeks to recruit men for the company he’s had to raise to prove himself worthy of his commission. I have watched and stood by in silence while others I grew up with have signed on. And I know he hasn’t reached his quota of men yet. Betsy has told me.”
“Has Betsy also told you what it will do to your parents if you enlist?”
“She’s not had to tell me that. I have anguished and prayed on my decision. Thy brother and I have been close for many years. I cannot stay and let him fight the British so we can keep our land.”
“But it’s against your faith to fight.”
“It is part of the Quaker philosophy that if thee has a concern, thee has the responsibility to follow through on it. I have a concern.”
He looked at me, waiting. I was cold through to the bone and anxious about the trouble I was in at home. I was annoyed with Raymond, who had suddenly become very dear to me as he stood there talking about Quaker philosophy.
“I’ll never forgive you if you get killed. Do you know that?”
He smiled. “Thee will help me, then?”
“How can I help?”
He cast glances up and down Queen Street, which was deserted. “Will Dan be home tonight?”
“He comes and goes as he pleases these days. Sometimes when he’s out recruiting, he doesn’t come home until morning. And sometimes young men knock on our door in the middle of the night to enlist. He did promise Mother he’d be home for supper, though. We’re having Indian pot roast. He wouldn’t miss that.”
“I will be in thy barn at ten tonight. All thee has to do is tell Dan. It would anguish thy parents if I came to the house.”
“Oh, Raymond!”
“It disturbs thee.”
“Yes, it disturbs me. I know the Patriot women are supposed to send their men off to war with pride. And I am proud. But it still disturbs me. And what will Betsy say about Dan taking you? He’s about to ask for he
r hand, you know.”
“Betsy knows I will enlist elsewhere if not with Dan.”
The wind gusted around us, wrapping us both in guilt and misery. “All right,” I agreed. “I’ll tell Dan.” His eyes sought mine as he lingered. He started to speak, then stopped.
“Yes, Raymond?”
“I hold thee in very high esteem, Jemima Emerson. I’ll not forget thee.” He turned and ran, leaving me with my mouth open in the middle of the street.
CHAPTER
3
Dan did come home that night as he had promised, but the chance to tell him about Raymond Moore was lost because of the presence of John Reid at our table.
Reid was a weasel if there ever was one. He bullied me in my lessons, scolded me constantly about my penmanship, and was not “agreeable to the newest rules and truest methods practiced by the best teachers,” as he advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette for his boys’ school in Trenton.
And he was a Tory, reason alone for me to hate him. I’d heard that he birched the boys in his school when they misbehaved. If it was true, it added a menacing quality to him, which he did nothing to dispel.
Mother said nothing about my misadventures that day. She was too busy supervising Lucy in the kitchen. She sent me to the parlor to fetch both Reid and Dan for supper. In the hall I met David, freshly scrubbed and dressed. David was fourteen and at the moment very sullen.
“That Reid is a rat.”
“What did he do, David?”
“Told Father I was with Fitch again today.”
“What did Father do?”
“Nothing yet. Hasn’t said a word to me about it.”
That was worse than anything. Father was slow to anger, but when he did, he demanded intellectual argument. You had to defend yourself, and he didn’t back off until you were in tears.
“Reid sent Dan for me, that’s what he did.”
“Did Dan scold?”
“No. Dan understands what I’m trying to do with Fitch. All he said was to be careful. Then I got back here and found that Reid had told Father. Who does he think he is, a member of this family?”
“Mother and Father have practically adopted him, you know that, David. We just have to put up with him.”
