“Dress up! Look to your right and dress the line!” McDonald was just clearing the low wall with his men. If they were attacked now, they’d be destroyed, divided and spread too thin. There was no cover in this field and no way to stand in the scrub of the last field and be cohesive. Caesar could see that they had to strike a strong blow here, not a little raid, or Stewart would still walk into the guns.
McDonald was on line. He nodded to Caesar and Caesar yelled the orders.
“Make ready!”
Even in open order, all the muskets went up crisply, as every man cocked his firelock smoothly.
“Present!” The end of the rebel flank was flinching away, retreating already. Caesar didn’t blame them.
“Fire!” The volley swept the corner right off the rebel battalion, like a tool loosening a rock from the earth.
“Fire!” McDonald’s volley was a sharper sound. The rebels fell like wheat for a scythe, and they began to run. They didn’t run happily, like militia, but slowly, bitterly, like men who were close to a great victory and were suddenly deprived.
Stewart’s men came up the hill in lines. They weren’t very deep, and the last part of the hill sloped very steeply, but they felt, or heard, the support at the top and suddenly they came on strongly, covering the last few paces in a rush. Stewart jumped his horse up the last incline, the big mare gathering her haunches and then leaping, scrambling for purchase, and then Stewart was at the top, among his own company. The Sixty-fourth lights and the Fortieth came up all together, suddenly too many to throw back, and the crest was theirs. Jeremy came up then, riding his smaller mare easily through the brush and into the field. Stewart waved at Jeremy, and the two met in front of Caesar. Jeremy had a smoking pistol in each hand, a look of triumph on his face and blood all over his front.
“That was splendid!” said Jeremy. He had a deep cut on his face, and the turban on his hat was shredded where a ball had cut it, but he was unaware of it. Jeremy waved at the second line, now coming up the hill.
“I’ve never seen anything to beat it,” said Jeremy.
“Shall we do it again?” said Stewart. He laughed, all tension draining from him. He was watching the rebels pull back behind their rearguard lower on the slope.
“They won’t come back at us,” he said, answering his own question. He clapped Caesar on the shoulder wordlessly, then rode over to McDonald and said something that made that hard man smile broadly.
Somewhere, lower on the hill, a rebel fife was playing “Roslin Castle” like a lament, and Caesar sobered from the high spirits of survival and victory, and went to count the cost.
They didn’t run back down Chatterton’s Hill. They marched. The rearguard was strong, and the effort of taking the crest so costly for the redcoats that there was no pursuit.
It didn’t matter. George Lake watched the line ripple and fold, struck in the front and the flank, and knew that again, the British had beaten them, and again, they would be driven from the field, from a fortified position. He wanted to understand why the British were such good soldiers. He wanted to be that good himself. He wanted revenge on the Highlanders and Hessians who had chased him around Long Island and Manhattan and were now combining to chase him from here.
He hadn’t lost a man today, because they had never made it into the action. That had its advantages, including that a great many new recruits had seen a battle without fleeing, and would, he thought, be less likely to flee the next one.
If they stayed. George Lake would stay until victory, or until Washington gave up. He was here for the cause. But other men were asking hard questions again, and tonight, he knew all the militia would go home again.
Washington rode slowly over the plain behind Chatterton’s Hill, still angry at the precipitous flight of the militia. This defeat was his own fault, for again trusting militia in his forward posts, for accepting battle in a position that could be turned. Howe was teaching him a great deal about warfare, and he wondered how his opponent would do with an army composed of militia, second-rate regulars, and men who only served for a year. He shook his head, angry at himself for the weakness of his argument. Sir William’s soldiers were better, but he had had to train them himself, too, after Boston.
The loss of White Plains meant he would lose his depot of materials. He couldn’t rebuild his lines in the ridges behind the town, now, as Lee had planned. In fact, he’d be lucky to keep New Jersey. He was running out of terrain in which to fight, and Howe would soon start pressing him toward Philadelphia.
Washington had always contended to others that the task was hard, but he admitted to himself that he had said this at least in part from a sense of modesty. Now, watching his army retreat from the field at White Plains, he began to think that this task was beyond him. Again, the militia would defect. Again, he would have to train new men, find them muskets and uniforms, and keep them together through the winter.
Behind him, there were bodies on the ground, men he had ordered into action and who had died—some of them because he had made mistakes in his deployment. He stopped his horse, to the consternation of his staff, and looked back over the field. In some way, the desertion of the militia was a direct judgment on him. He was killing his men while he learned to be a general.
Last winter he had barely kept an army together while beating the British at Boston. If winter was difficult for a victorious army, what would it bring for one that had suffered defeat after defeat?
A few paces away, Lee surveyed the British Army advancing carefully, not really bothering to maintain contact with his rearguard, treating them with contempt. Most of the regiments had fought well, and the men, and the cause, had deserved better. He realized that the adjutant general, Reed, had ridden up beside him, and they sat together in bitter silence.
“I could have won this battle, had I been allowed,” Lee said, wishing the words unsaid as soon as they left his lips.
“I think he must go,” said Reed. And both of them looked away, stricken that their doubts had finally been voiced.
The Black Guides stood in two neat ranks at the top of Chatterton’s Hill. They were standing at their ease, and their muskets were grounded. Men smoked, or talked in low tones, and each, even the newest men, took their turns to bury the four dead men they had lost in their fights on the hill. Caesar dug first, and then waited for Virgil to finish before the two of them shared a pipe.
“Evah think this war goin’ to kill us all befo’ we win her?” asked Virgil. Caesar took out his tinder and struggled with relighting the pipe, which he had let go out. Paget had just finished his turn at Romeo’s grave and was walking stiffly toward the treeline. The weather was beautiful, the sky a deep blue with the setting sun red and pure in the western sky.
Caesar puffed hard, still trying to get the pipe to light.
“An’ is it jus’ me, or ah them Doodles gettin’ better ever’ time we meet them?” Virgil hunched his shoulders. “You plannin’ to marry that pipe, or you wan’ give it here so I can fix yo’ foolishness?”
Jim, no longer Little Jim, had an arm around Paget. Some other men were near them, and then others stood in different groups. Every death affected someone in the company directly, and then spread in little ripples to the rest. Caesar thought himself hard to the deaths, like he had been in the swamp, but Romeo was different, somehow. A foolish man, and sometimes a brutal one, but Romeo’s trust in Caesar had been absolute since the day Caesar beat him. And that trust had killed him.
Virgil snapped his tinder kit shut with a little crack and lit the pipe in three deft motions. He inhaled deeply and passed it to Caesar.
“You in charge, Caesar. People gonna’ die. It ain’t you’ fault unless you want it be.”
They smoked, and the sun sank, and then they marched away and left a row of graves, like the rows they had left the other times.
4
New York City, November 28, 1776
Taverns in the city of New York were, by and large, cramped affairs, w
ith a snug and a few small tables close around a central fireplace, and perhaps a private room. They didn’t have dance floors, and rarely had music beyond that offered by a vagabond fiddler.
The Moor’s Head across from the barracks at 10 Broadway was a different animal altogether. Perhaps because the building had started life as a warehouse with a comfortable front shop for clients, it had the space for dancing that the other taverns lacked. The tavern was larger, better furnished, and better served than any of the sailors’ dives or public houses along the waterfront on Burnett’s Key or Water Street, and infinitely better in air and spaciousness than the narrow drinking shops between Stone Street and Marketfield where the soldiers tended to congregate. Perhaps it was better because the consortium of owners were black men, to whom a tavern license had been forbidden for all the years until the conquest of the city by the British Army.
The Black House, as it came to be known, was the regular off-duty home for the Company of Black Guides who had their winter quarters across the street. Many of their women worked in the kitchen or did the house’s laundry, augmenting their army rations with the hard currency paid by the house’s many well-born white patrons. Almost as soon as its blue door opened, a peculiar military demimonde sprang into being at its tables. The male patrons were often members of the best families, and if the same could not be said for the majority of the female patrons, it was not that their manners, or indeed their costume, seemed in the least beneath the quality of their “friends”.
The central fireplace, a behemoth of brick and mortar that cast its heat well back into the cavernous common room, saw gatherings of red-coated officers and their Loyalist compatriots as soon as the weather stalled their advance through New Jersey. Before November was very old, a map of the northern colonies taken from the Gentleman’s Magazine was framed and mounted in the good light by the fire, where campaigns could be the more easily planned by ambitious subalterns and armchair brigadiers. The claret was passable and cheap, the landlord had a number of cubbyholes to hide the shy, and Mother Abbott’s, the most genteel brothel in the city, was an easy walk away.
If any of the regular patrons were surprised by the familiarity of the black patrons, they were never allowed to forget that this was a black tavern, the first such to be licensed in the city, and that it owed its existence to its black clientele. The white officers came for the space, and after a time for the fashion of the place, but for the blacks it was the only tavern where they were welcome.
The black woman pulled at the heavy petticoats around her hips and drew them up above her ankles, showing the dark slimness of her legs under white silk stockings. She had her tongue clenched in her teeth in a most engaging manner, and James Julius Stewart thought her the handsomest woman in the room, and possibly in New York.
She moved her legs again.
“Pas de bourrée,” she said, concentrating on her feet. She seemed to curtsy, then rise and float. Stewart and the three other officers—and a crowd of delighted onlookers—watched her slippered feet as she rose on to the points of her toes to walk straight-legged for three steps before gliding back down into the curtsy, or plié.
Monsieur, the French-Canadian dancing maître who had attached himself to the Moor’s Head, was giving another officer a private lesson and he came back across the room to the thick crowd around Mother Abbott’s girls where they were attempting to repeat the steps he had just demonstrated.
He glanced at Stewart with mock venom.
“If Monsieur le Capitaine wishes to learn to dance, he would do better learning from me,” and he rolled his eyes at the women, “even if I lack some of their obvious attractions.”
Jeremy, silent until now but admiring the women from a safe distance, prodded Stewart gently with one finger.
“Do it,” he said in a whisper.
While Stewart stood, indecisive, Monsieur stood in front of the women and paused, beautifully at rest in his plié position.
“Pas coupé,” he said, and performed one. None of the women was as good as he, but the black woman with the magnificent legs was graceful even in her hesitant approach to his steps, and he fixed on her. Mother Abbott shook her head from a settee near the fire and called out.
“Sally, you behave yourself, child. This is not our house.”
The men laughed, but she continued to keep her eyes down and her tongue clenched between her teeth.
Jeremy led his master to one side. They made a handsome pair, Jeremy resplendent in gold-buttoned scarlet and his master in a plain frock coat of plaid.
“You’ve always wanted to dance, sir. And I’ll say respectfully, there is no better place. Consider, if you will, returning to London as an able, or even accomplished, dancer. Consider how it marks you in any society, that you lack this accomplishment, so necessary among the gentry. No one here can tell tales about you. It is not at all the same as going to some public dancing master in London who may ridicule your efforts and your age. And if I may speak from some experience, this man knows his art.”
The bitter truth was that without dancing, Stewart was marked even in America as a man whose origins could not be the best. The ability to dance a minuet, or even open a ball with a small ballet, denoted a childhood of affluence with dancing masters and tutors.
“I’m sure Miss Mary would prefer you to return to Edinburgh with this accomplishment.”
He regretted the statement as soon as he made it. Miss Mary, the object of years of Captain Stewart’s devotion, was not a subject that he could find suitable in a tavern. He looked dourly at Jeremy, who stared woodenly back, hoping he had not spoiled his entire attack. Jeremy was an able dancer himself, and had looked forward to spending afternoons here, watching the lessons and impressing the ladies with his own accomplishments.
A group of women, accompanied by two officers of newly raised Loyalist corps, came in a rush, interrupting them and filling the space with a fine sparkle of femininity.
“The flowers of the field,” commented Stewart, a little wry.
Miss Poppy, who was well known to all the gentlemen present, was a blond, and wore her golden-yellow gown with more humor than dignity. She smiled on all, as if she expected life to be a constant delight, and a circle of admirers surrounded her. The girls from Mother Abbott’s shrank instantly against the wall, eclipsed by “proper” women from the city’s better families.
Behind Miss Poppy was her older sister, Miss Hammond, who managed in a single glance at the huddle near the far wall to convey that there would be no conflict.
“I told you that this was the sort of place a woman could go,” she said graciously, as if recognizing one of the sisters from Mother Abbott’s as an acquaintance. Her escort, a thin elegant man of middle height in a fine green coat, raised his glass a moment and turned a trifle pale.
“Surely, miss, you don’t mean that…”
“I think, sir, that you should consider your ground a little, before you tell me what I should mean.” The archness of her reply was ameliorated a little by her touching his sleeve with her fan. The other women with her laughed and hid their faces, and one giggled noticeably. The other man turned from a side conversation to reveal himself as John Graves Simcoe in a fine velvet coat. Stewart had seldom seen him out of regimentals, and he hurried forward to make his bow.
“Captain Simcoe,” he said, smiling broadly.
“Captain Stewart,” returned Simcoe. “May I present Ensign Martin of the Loyal Militia, and Mr. Chew, currently without a regiment but desirous of serving His Majesty?”
Stewart bowed to each in turn. They were young men, both clearly in awe of Simcoe, and now Stewart.
Miss Hammond paused by Simcoe, and he presented her as well.
“Captain Stewart, Miss Hammond, a local family, and her sister, Miss Poppy.” They curtsied. “And Ensign Martin’s sister, Miss Martin, and her friends, Miss Amanda Chew and Miss Jennifer. Mrs. Innes, whose husband is in the commissary line. And Miss Hight.”
Miss Poppy was
clearly the prize, with a freckled English face and golden hair, but neither the Chew nor the Martin was anything but pretty, and Miss Hammond had more presence than all the other women together. She wore a fine modern traveling gown that showed off her waist. Stewart thought privately that the tall black girl, Sally, was her equal for dignity of carriage, but it was an odd comparison to make, and he didn’t pursue it. The two younger women, almost girls, wore dresses a year out of fashion and in materials not calculated to endear them to Englishmen, but Stewart gave them his best smile. They were all children, to him. Mrs. Innes was handsome in spite of her giggle, and Miss Hight so became her name that Stewart thought she looked more like an officer of grenadiers than Simcoe.
“Captain Simcoe, I understand that there is to be dancing here, with a dancing master,” said Miss Hammond, more in an answer than a question. Simcoe nodded gravely to her.
“Stewart as much as lives here, Miss Hammond. I think you would better address him.”
She looked at him gravely. “Is there to be dancing, Captain Stewart?”
Stewart looked toward Monsieur for help.
“I give lessons here for a fee, to any who wish them,” Monsieur said. “I also put on the occasional ballet. It remains to be seen if I will ever have the quality of student to perform a proper dance here.”
“There isn’t anyone in the town who wouldn’t benefit from a lesson, sir. Excepting Miss Hight, who is the best of us. But I had hoped we might have dancing, perhaps by subscription. The Moor’s Head is the only common room of a size.”
Washington and Caesar Page 39
