Washington and Caesar
Page 60
There were shots behind them. She didn’t turn, and so she missed the flurry of fighting as the hussars swept down the road. She dragged Sammy into the cover of a shallow depression. There was still snow here, and it was cold. Her petticoats began to take water from the damp ground. She was breathing like a horse after a run, and all thought seemed to have left her. She rolled on to her stomach and tried to look over the crest of her cover, and the cold April wind took her straw hat, blinding her for a moment. And then she saw the huddle of men on the road and green coats all around them.
“See them, Sam?”
“Yes’m.”
“Queen’s Rangers.”
“Ones on foot be Loyal Americans.”
“Let’s go an’ let them round us up, then.”
Philadelphia, June 11, 1779
Riding was still a new adventure for George Lake, and he regarded the journey from the Continental army camp near Newburgh, New York, to the capital at Philadelphia with some apprehension. He had been sent carrying dispatches, at his own request, as he had his own agenda to follow in Philadelphia. But the journey was a labor.
He had a good horse, thanks to the marquis, who was now absent in France but had left George many of his belongings. He was well turned out, in a new coat and a proper greatcoat, and wore good boots and clean linen. Indeed, thoughout his journey, he was accorded a level of respect from innkeepers and fellow travelers that he had not experienced outside his own circle in the army. It pleased him, although he tried not to let it go to his head. At the ferry over the Delaware, the boatman’s daughter flirted to the edge of lewdness, which caused him to wriggle. She was pretty enough, but he was too close to Betsy to feel any temptation.
What he noticed most, besides the ache in his thighs and knees, was the change in attitude his uniform provoked. In the Jerseys and Pennsylvania, he was now treated as a figure of authority and respect, whereas just a year or two earlier he wouldn’t have been welcome under many roofs. The world was changing. People were finally choosing sides.
He saw other signs that were uglier. Everywhere he rode there were burned-out houses, and fields left fallow. Twice he met families on the road, refugees driven out by their neighbors for taking a stand opposed to the majority in their region. The war was hardening attitudes, causing longstanding disagreements to burst forth as violence.
Philadelphia looked prosperous. Even on the outskirts, there were new houses and a new tavern being built, and the river was full of ships. Even a Royal Navy blockade couldn’t keep the French out of the Chesapeake or the most ambitious Massachusetts men from trading. The shops were full of goods and the people in the streets were the best dressed in America, but they seemed surly. Perhaps they saw too many uniforms. His treatment was different here and people all but crossed the street to avoid him.
George took a room at an inn near the Congress and went to deliver his dispatches immediately. He knew the contents intimately: reports on the progress of General Sullivan’s expedition against the Iroquois, which George had viewed as a gimcrack strategy; reports on the movement of British ships and men in and out of New York; and a report on the state of the army near New York. Washington was not quite laying siege to the British forces there, but he had them under close observation while he sent many of his troops to face the British attacks on Charleston and other ports in the south.
The entry of France into the war had changed it profoundly and had other effects than just the return of the marquis to his homeland. With France in the war and the loss of Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga, the British were forced to place their main effort in the Caribbean to prevent the loss of their valuable spice islands to the French Navy. Both sides were now concentrating military efforts in the Carolinas, where a fleet avoiding the hurricane season could relax within easy covering distance of the rich islands farther south. And the British had discovered, perhaps too late, the wealth of Loyalist sentiment that existed in the southern back-country.
While armies and fleets skirmished for the possession of anchorages and bases in the south, the war in the north burned on as a series of raids and counter-raids. Loyalists and Indians attacked the Mohawk Valley to cut Washington off from his grain supply, and Washington sent Sullivan to drive the Iroquois from their villages in retaliation. Around New York City, spies and partisans fought a skulking war every day. The dispatches covered these new realities in detail and the logistics that supported them.
He handed his dispatches to a member of the Continental Congress who immediately encouraged him to comment on the papers he bore. George refrained. The army had already survived two periods of intense internal politics and General Washington had made it clear that he didn’t intend to put up with a third. George had little interest in such talk. He requested a signed receipt for the dispatches and found himself in the street, a short walk from his real destination. He was clean and neat, well dressed, and at the end of his duty, and yet he paused, going into a coffee house.
He hadn’t been to the Lovells’ since the day of the looters and despite many letters he feared to put to the test his resolve to ask Mr. Lovell for his daughter’s hand. He might no longer be welcome. Sitting alone in the coffee house, nursing a cup of bitter coffee, he wondered why the idea of being forbidden a house he had entered only once as a guest made so much difference. He thought it might be that he had spent so long imagining the house and its occupants that he felt a more frequent visitor.
To make matters worse, none of his letters had been answered in two months. It was the lack of letters from Betsy that had spurred him to action. Now that he had arrived, he feared to find out the truth. She had married. She had been forbidden to write. Anything seemed possible.
He stood once again in the street outside the coffee house before finally forcing himself to walk the two blocks to the Lovells’, whistling the “Rogue’s March” as he went like a condemned soldier. He walked up the steps briskly, his boot heels ringing against the brick, and tapped on the door with the force of nerves.
He knocked again a few moments later, louder this time. The door of the next house opened and a maid leaned out. She was pretty, and Irish, like most of the maids in Quaker houses. She ducked back as soon as she saw him. He knocked again.
A small boy was standing at the foot of the steps with a wooden hoop. He had been pushing the hoop with a stick, but now he just watched George.
“Are you a real soldier?” he asked.
“I am, lad.”
“May I hold your sword?” he asked, turning his eyes away as he spoke, perhaps ashamed of his own daring. George laughed and came down the steps.
“You can hold the hilt, but I’ll just keep a grip on her. There, isn’t she fine?”
“Oh yes, sir.”
“So, do you live hereabouts?”
“Oh, yes, sir!”
“What’s your name?”
“Alexander Keating, if you please, sir.”
“Well, Alexander Keating, do you know the people who live in this house?”
“I used to know them, sir. Mrs. Lovell made the best orange marmalade and Miss Betsy was the prettiest girl on the street, or so my mama said.”
“Good for your mama. I can’t agree more.” George was wrestling with the construction “used to know”. “Where are the Lovells now?”
“They had to clear out. Mama says the Committee of Safety was wrong to make them go, but Papa says I shouldn’t talk of such things.”
“I imagine he does. Could you take me to meet your mama?”
“Oh, I haven’t been rude, have I, sir?”
“Not at all, Alexander. And you handle that hoop very well indeed. Now march me round to your mama. That’s the boy.”
In minutes, he was seated in another Philadelphia parlor, being fed coffee by the matronly Mrs. Keating. She clucked over the Lovells. It was some moments before George reassured her that he was a friend and not a servant of the committee. Wealthy Philadelphia had developed a distrust of uniforms and Ge
orge resented it the more for the respect he had felt on his trip south from New York.
“They came several times. I’m not speaking against the government, you understand,” she said, almost in a whisper, and with a look over her shoulder that spoke volumes. “I’m not saying that Mr. Lovell wasn’t a little too loud in his defense of King George. He was arrested, and he paid a fine. An’ most of that fine lined the pockets of the ‘officer’ who arrested him, I have no doubt. My husband would scold me if he heard me talking this way, to an officer an’ all. But a person has to be heard. What’s this ‘freedom’ I hear so much about? The Lovells have none, I believe.”
George sat and drank his coffee silently.
“Oh, I’ve offended you, Captain. I’m so sorry. We’re good Americans, really. But the Lovells had always been our friends.”
“Ma’am, I’m an officer in the Continental Army.” George paused a moment, and then spoke his mind. “I’m a plain man, an apprentice when the war began. I’ve fought since ’75 an’ I reckon I’ll see it through to the end, an’ I don’t have any time for these Committees of Safety. In New York Colony, we had to use the army to suppress some of them. Mostly, they ain’t patriots. They are a vehicle for greedy, cruel men to tyrannize their neighbors. If they was anything else, they’d be in the army.”
He rose and handed her his coffee dish. “I won’t trouble you more, ma’am, with my own seditious talk.” He tore out a sheet from his pocket book and wrote on it in pencil. “This is my address in camp. If the Lovells come back, or you get word of them, would you send to me?”
“Of course I will! I’m a goose! You’re the officer Betsy was always on about, aren’t you?”
George frowned, then smiled. “I reckon I might be, ma’am.”
“Oh, goodness. Oh, of course you want to know where they went. Well, I suppose that all the Tories go to England or to New York. I think that Silas had a place in New York. So you and your camp are closer to the Lovells than I am.” She laughed, a little wildly. She was still very much on edge.
George didn’t ask for a second cup because he could tell Mrs. Keating was nervous to have him and unhappy to discuss the Lovells. He went back to his inn, claimed his gear and his horse, and set out on his return trip. He didn’t want to spend a night in Philadelphia if he could help it.
Betsy might be in New York, just nine miles from George’s camp. And only the British Army between us, George thought as he started north.
New York City, November 30, 1779
It was St. Andrew’s Day.
In the early afternoon the tavern hosted the party for Caesar’s wedding. This was not a common event in taverns, and the service itself, performed unflinchingly by the bride’s father, was held in an Anglican chapel up King Street a ways, so that the party had to squelch to and fro through the muddy streets. Caesar carried his bride, the length of his former master’s great cape wrapped around her so that her French silk gown, imported illegally and with a great deal of anticipation by mercantile connections of Captain Stewart, came through untouched.
Back at the Moor’s Head, all the musicians of the Guides, as well as the musicians of several line companies and two very tall pipers come early for the St. Andrew’s Day festivities, made themselves into a military band and proceeded to play with loud competence. The rafters echoed with songs both military and profane, but it was the dances that everyone would remember later.
Stewart enjoyed the rare pleasure of partnering Sally in public. He did not disgrace himself and she seemed transformed. He wanted her transformed. She spent too much time considering her shadowed future as it was. She had come in a simple gown, as if to keep her charms from rivaling those of the wedding couple.
Caesar was magnificent in a scarlet coat and half boots. He looked like a martial statue, except few statues laughed as much. The scars on his face were almost invisible when he laughed, and he laughed often. When it was his turn, he raised his glass and spoke of Polly and Reverend White, and then of Jeremy. Stewart, unprepared, could only weep. But it passed in a moment and he raised his glass, his tartan coat in contrast to the brighter colors all around him.
But it was Polly who took all eyes. The Hammond girls, the elder of them soon to be wed to Mr. Martin, arranged to arrive at a time where they might have been coming early for the St. Andrew’s Day party—a thin fiction to fool their parents—but even Poppy’s golden hair and fashion couldn’t compete with Polly’s straight back and the contrast of her complexion and the color of her gown. Polly was the most beautiful woman in the room, and perhaps in New York, and she and Caesar danced to everything, sang every song, toasted their friends and gave them something good to last the longest winter of the war.
Before darkness had fallen, most of the wedding party was back in the barracks across the street, many barely able to stand. Sergeant McDonald, who had struck up a friendship with the two pipers and felt obliged to stay for the second festivity, pronounced it the best wedding he had ever attended.
The Moor’s Head stayed full. There wasn’t room for another man or woman to fit under the rafters, and the din roared out into the street and across to the barracks there, and up to Mother Abbott’s and down to the docks. Men drank at their cards, a piper played an endless, complex pibroch while a critical crowd watched, and everywhere men sang.
Highlanders and Lowlanders and Scots by courtesy danced and sang, recited poetry or, if greatly daring, gave voice in Gaelic. Sgt. McDonald and the pair of pipers from Mull had seized the best table early and held it against all comers, proclaiming the superiority of Scotland, Alan McLean and the Hebrides to all who would listen. The eldest, a white-headed man named Cameron, declaimed from Ossian and challenged any man to tell him the great bard was a counterfeit.
After the wedding, the Scots had begun to arrive in earnest and the character of the place changed. Colonel Robinson was a late addition, along with his guest. Stewart laid himself out to be amiable, aware that he was just a shade short of drunkenness. Jeremy would have been leading him home, by now. Sally had given him a meaningful glance when she left, and that had been hours ago. He watched, and sang, and shouted, and drank more.
From time to time the door opened and brought cold and damp and newcomers, often couples coming from other parties. There were several St. Andrew’s revels in New York and it seemed that everyone in the town was Scottish.
Stewart heard the men from Mull singing “Come o’er the Stream, Charlie” and wondered how seditious the evening would become. Behind him, Robinson waved for a waiter.
“Some of your countrymen still want the Jacobite pretender, Captain?”
“Not really. Most think he’s a useless sod and a drunk. And Roman, to boot. But the resentment is still there. Aye, and some of the songs you’ll hear tonight are still illegal at home.” Stewart raised his glass. “But we were always Whigs, so I won’t drink to the King over the water. I was just born when the Prince came over and me Da’ stayed in his counting house like a proper Edinburgh gent.”
Robinson laughed. He was Virginia born, well bred, a former friend of George Washington, but he hated slavery and hated the Continental Congress, too. Some said he and Washington had fought over a woman. Whatever the truth, he had married in the north and stayed there, and now he commanded one of the better Loyalist corps. Stewart liked him well enough but he was no substitute for Simcoe, who was away in the south.
“You British make such an issue about counting houses and the like. No one in America cares. We’re all in trade.” He waved his wine glass at the room. “Could you have St. Andrew’s like this at home? No. Half these men wouldn’t be allowed in the same room as the other half.”
Stewart nodded his agreement and thought about Caesar’s wedding. He might have let the wine lead him astray, because when Stewart looked up he found that they had been joined by a family, a rotund man and his handsome wife and even handsomer daughter. The man bowed to Colonel Robinson, who rose from his chair and bowed in return.
Mrs. Lovell made a face and tapped the colonel lightly with her fan.
Stewart rose to his feet and bowed.
“Mr. Lovell of the commissary, may I introduce Captain Stewart of the army.”
“Your servant, sir,” said Stewart, racking his brain for why the name of Lovell seemed so familiar.
“And yours, sir.”
“You are Scottish, Captain?” asked Mrs. Lovell.
“Born and bred in sight of Holyrood, ma’am.”
Mrs. Lovell smiled and nodded. “My family is from Aberdeen.”
Mr. Lovell winced at the pibroch, which had reached a level of intensity rivaled only by the complexity of the repetition.
“When did you come to America?” asked Stewart.
“I came as a girl, in one of my father’s ships. I’m an Ogilvy.”
Stewart bowed again. “I suspect I know your brothers, ma’am. My father is Kenneth Stewart, the Turkey merchant.”
In a moment they were off in a rush of reminiscence. Short of meeting a friend from Edinburgh or from his school days, Captain Stewart couldn’t have made a happier acquaintance. They spoke for several minutes, animated, exchanging names and laughing, until Mrs. Lovell noticed that her husband had gone off with Colonel Robinson and her daughter was standing by, somewhat listless.
“I don’t think my husband introduced my daughter, Betsy.”
At the name Betsy, the whole memory crystallized for Stewart and a shadow crossed his face.
Both women noticed the change. For a moment, he was again confronting the loss of Jeremy and the days just after. But he rallied quickly.
“Are you ill, sir?” asked Mrs. Lovell, looking for water.