Washington and Caesar

by Christian Cameron

  “The French have moved south and the whole rebel army is in New Jersey,” said Robinson, pointing at the map over the fireplace.

  Martin took a draw on his pipe. “Mr. Washington can be a deep one, sir.”

  Stewart favored his arm, now healing well, and reached his left hand for his wine. “Mr. Washington is marching to Virginia to take Lord Cornwallis,” he said carefully, looking into his glass. The other two officers took sharp breaths, and Robinson cursed.

  “Gentlemen, there is nothing we can do to stop him. But, Beverly,” this to Colonel Robinson, “in his absence, I think it would be surprising if we didn’t snap up some of his posts.”

  Robinson leaned forward. “Because his army can’t be in two places at once?”

  “Even Mr. Washington can’t do that.”

  “It will take some time to plan all over again,” said Robinson.

  “We’ll need new intelligence. They’ve moved all their posts,” said Martin.

  Stewart raised his glass to a distant corner where Sally sat sewing with Polly.

  “Here’s to Mr. Washington, gentlemen. In his absence, great things may be accomplished.”

  New York, September 10, 1781

  In New York, the weather had turned to rain, a harsh, cold rain that kept everyone indoors. It promised to be a hard fall. Caesar stood in the bow window of the Moor’s Head watching a few laborers run through the wet, mud splashing up their thighs. He pitied the soldiers out in the lines.

  Major Stewart had a pint of Madeira and a map, and he used them to make his points. “If you really want to leave the impression that the whole thing is an accident, or perhaps that it was about something very different, then I think our best hope is to hide it under Colonel Robinson’s expedition. If Robinson attacks the outposts near the Hudson, we can take Bludner in the same sweep with the same men. But we need to know just where the rebel posts are and just where Bludner’s men camp. We need the whole layout of the area. When we take Bludner’s courier he may spill all of it or he may try and lead us into a trap. I want to know the ground in advance.”

  “So we take the courier the night that Colonel Robinson plans to go after the rebel posts?”

  “Just so. It came to me when Robinson was telling about his plan. Caesar, do you concur?”

  “I do, sir.”

  “And do you know the area?”

  “We were all over that ground last year.” Caesar could see it in his mind’s eye.

  “And Reverend White says that Bludner’s covering party is usually by the Van Cortland house. Look here. That’s less than a mile from the ferry.”

  “Stands to reason, sir. There are only so many approaches between our lines and theirs, and Bludner’s spies need the ferry.”

  “Just so, Sergeant Caesar, just so. Do you see it, Reverend?”

  Marcus White looked at Caesar carefully, as if judging him all over again.

  “Doesn’t Mr. Van Sluyt have a wife?” White asked.

  “He does, but that has never kept him from his duty…” Caesar trailed off as he saw that he had missed the mark entirely. Marcus White was looking off into the distance.

  “Perhaps his wife would go. Women pass the lines very easily. She could take Polly…”

  Caesar shuddered.

  “I’ve done it before, Julius.” She fairly bounced with enthusiasm and his heart died within him. He wanted to say, “But you are pregnant.” Yet he understood that would be a betrayal.

  “But we already know all this,” he protested.

  “No, Caesar. We guess it. And if we’re going to commit hundreds of men up the river, we have to know.”

  Marcus looked at Polly and they smiled at each other, a smile of private communication. Stewart shook his shoulders a little.

  “I don’t like sending them in harm’s way…”

  “I’d do anything to get Bludner,” said Polly.

  Mount Vernon, 10 September, 1781

  Truro Church brought a lump to his throat. As he pulled his horse to a stop and looked at the church’s pattern of Flemish brick for a little, the church unleashed a flood of memory, of obligations and uncompleted tasks from another life. For the first time in five years he wondered who was a warden and whether the rector’s roof had ever been repaired. He could see bricks missing from the churchyard wall.

  David Humphreys, the only one of his staff to accompany him on his dash to Mount Vernon, looked ready to fall off his horse. Billy Lee looked better, tired but easy on his tall bay. Washington’s decision to go home for one night on the way to his campaign had been the product of a rare whim, and he had ridden sixty miles in a day to get here. Few men had the stamina to stay with him.

  Past the churchyard, he was really home. Those were his fields on either side of the road, and the road itself, which needed repair, he was sorry to note, was also his. All the way from Baltimore the roads had been bad, but here in Frederick County they were virtually impassable, just near his home and in the path of his army that needed speed for his troops and more speed for his supplies.

  “Good to be home, eh, Billy?” said Washington, turning slightly in his saddle. He was concerned that Humphreys might have a fall, and took the opportunity to give him a glance.

  “Yes, sir,” said Billy.

  The sun was setting as he finally turned his horse through his gates and was greeted by the moving sight of Mount Vernon glowing with the last light, and all the windows lit from inside. A white man he didn’t know ran from behind the Greenhouse, calling that there were visitors, and Washington smiled, the spell of his own house strong on him.

  “Well ridden, David,” he said to his companion. The man bowed in the saddle, stiff with fatigue, and appeared unable to speak. Washington rode past the front of his house toward his stable and dismounted. None of the blacks looked familiar and he handed his horse to a stranger.

  “Do you know that boy, Billy?”

  “I don’t know any of these folk, sir.”

  Washington nodded, a little sharply, collected his pistols from his saddle holsters and gave them and his pannier to Billy. Then he walked up the sandy drive to the house, where doors were opened and there was a great deal of movement.

  She was standing just inside the door, an enigmatic smile on her face. Older, very much older, but the smile was the same and he laughed to see it.

  As he stepped over his own lintel, she came forward. “I thought perhaps you had forgotten the way?” she said, and he lifted her in his arms and kissed her, a rare excess in front of the house staff, but she didn’t protest. And he held her, remembered the weight and the smell of her, and he was home.

  “You are famous, I find,” she said. “Even I have a place in the pantheon.”

  It was so easy to forget who she was, how the sharp steel of her went along with the flame, and yet when he looked she wasn’t wearing her closed face, and he realized she was speaking at random because she was surprised. For five years he had written to her every day and only now did he think that she might have had the harder life, trapped here by her illnesses and her own will, without him. He took one of her hands and kissed it.

  She laughed.

  “I have gifts for you from many admirers, my dear,” he said. “But I am still the commander of an army, if only a little one, and I must send a letter this instant before I place myself at your service. May I have your pardon?”

  “You came home. I can forgive you much for that.” She gave him her precious smile of delight and turned into her parlor. “I will await you.”

  Washington gave Billy a nod. Billy knew which things to unpack and buff up; the miniature from Adrienne de Lafayette, the scent from France, and Washington passed into his study. He couldn’t call for David Humphreys, who was barely able to walk, and he was determined to send his letter tonight. He went to the desk, rifled it for paper and had to cut a quill. All his pens were years dead. Then he had to mix ink from powder, which required the help of an unfamiliar scullery maid. Finally he
had his materials to hand and he dashed off a letter to the commander of the Frederick County militia demanding that they turn out the next day to repair the roads.

  Then he rose and caught sight of the bust of Frederick the Great on the bookcase by his desk. He looked around at all the busts, Alexander and Caesar and Charles, and he shook his head as a grown man does when confronted with the excesses of youth. The busts put him in mind of something, though, and when he entered his wife’s parlor he was holding his own copy of Muller’s treatise on artillery and siegecraft.

  She was reading a novel by the fire, and he came and settled on an elegant chair that hadn’t been in the room when he left for the war.

  She put her book aside carefully. “Is the continent safe, then?”

  “As safe as my poor powers can make it. I had to order a repair to the roads. Our wagons would mire…”

  “It is not just the roads that lack repair, my general.”

  “Yes,” he said, falling in with her conversation. He knew what she was playing at, but he determined to act the part of the man. “Yes, the wall in Truro churchyard also needs repair.”

  “I heard talk of gifts,” she said.

  Washington rose and called for Billy, who brought them, gave him an odd look and left up the stairs. Washington had pounds of presents for her, because no French officer visited him without a gift for “Madame Washington”. He presented her with a selection of the best, along with a few that he had chosen himself in Philadelphia and the ride south. She began to open them, exclaiming softly over the scent and deriding the tastelessness of a gold snuffbox that must have cost as much as a good horse.

  “Now everything is from France,” she said. “I confess to missing our English trifles.”

  He brought out a final package from his pocket and she opened it and looked at him. It was a small étui, a collection of sewing tools in a plain sharkskin scabbard with severe silver mounts. She ran her hand over the shagreen, like polished pebbles set in leather, and clipped it to her housewife.

  “We still get some English goods,” he said.

  “You thought of me,” she said. Her eyes were moist, but she turned away. “You…”

  “Yes, my dear?” Once the words were out he knew what she wanted. He hadn’t told her how long he would be home, and she was too proud to ask.

  “I will have tomorrow here, alone. The next day my staff and the French staff will arrive, and we will have to entertain. On the twelfth, I’ll be gone.”

  “Gone? Where are you going?”

  “Down the Peninsula, Martha. Cornwallis is near Williamsburg. I hope to catch him with his back to the sea and make him surrender.”

  “Would that win the war?”

  He shook his head. “I no longer know.”

  She nodded, tears running down her face and neck.

  He rose and walked to the window. He saw movement on the lawn and was tempted to give her a moment alone and walk out to see his dogs. The pack would have been broken up, of course, but he thought of the slave, Caesar, and of hunts in the autumn and the feeling of anticipation, so like the feeling he had now. That put him in mind of slaves. He spoke without turning.

  “Have we changed a great many slaves?”

  “They ran.”

  “Ran?”

  “When Mr. Arnold’s army passed this way, and again when General Phillips was across the river. Each time the British came near, they flocked to join them.”

  Washington looked through the window again. “Can you blame them?”

  Martha rose from her chair and looked at him in mock horror. “Whoever you are, leave this house and tell my husband to return!”

  He shook his head, laughing with her, and then caught a hand and kissed it. “I’m perfectly serious.”

  Martha gave him that enigmatic smile and said, “I think it is time for supper. I wouldn’t want to keep the Generalissimo of the Continental Congress from his bed.” She stopped in the door and looked back at him, twenty years younger in the light. “Or mine.”

  He bowed, happy, and made to follow her, but she stopped him with her fan.

  “But you have changed.”

  “I have, too.”

  New York, October 1, 1781

  The Loyal Americans had the outer posts on the White Plains road, and Caesar got to know them as he came out every day to wait for her return. She was supposed to go out with Mrs. Van Sluyt and return the next day. After the third day of waiting he kept very much to himself. The Guides had recently been ordered to clean streets in New York, a loathsome chore and too much like labor for any of them. They cleaned for a day and grumbled, but Caesar would have none of it. He was quiet, and very dangerous.

  On the fourth day he stopped at the Whites’ lodging, finding neither father nor daughter. Then he walked out to the first line of posts, saluting officers and accepting the curious salutes of a variety of corps, and showed his pass, and then out alone through the dangerous ground between the first and second line, and so to the Loyal Americans again at sunset. He watched the road that led to Dobb’s Ferry and the rebel lines, but it was empty.

  The green-coated men were quiet around him. They knew something was up. They knew he had been there when two black girls crossed the lines, and they knew that Sergeant Caesar was a favorite of their own colonel. So they nodded to him, stood stiffly in a post that was probably comfortable in better times, and wished him luck.

  He watched until the sun went down, and then he picked his way back in the dark.

  On the fifth day, a flag crossed the lines, and Caesar feared it, because if Polly had been taken he fancied that the rebels might announce it, but his real fear was far darker, because he feared Bludner. Sally had turned Bludner into a demon, and Caesar tried not to imagine her being made a slave, or raped, or killed for the man’s sport. He hated this game, and he wondered if he would forgive Marcus White his willingness to play it with his own daughter.

  On the sixth day, the Loyal Americans had been replaced on the post by some of Emmerich’s men, a Loyalist regiment that included a fair number of rebel deserters, hard men, and in some cases very bad men. They were not so friendly, and they didn’t know him. They had a sergeant who seemed inclined to resent his presence. Caesar was too worried even to react to the slurs they passed casually, until he happened to look at the sergeant in just a certain way, and the sergeant withdrew, muttering. But although two parties of men passed the post, there were no women. It was a week until Sally’s messenger would return, and Polly was six days late, and Van Sluyt cried for his wife all day. Caesar knew he would have to resent the day labor soon, or do something to show that they were too useful to accept such treatment. But all he could think of was Polly.

  On the seventh day, he had no duty. None of the Guides did. They were not in the posts, and the labor order had been withdrawn as mysteriously as it appeared. Caesar took Van Sluyt and walked out through the lines, showing his worn pass to every post and being greeted familiarly as he went. He had done this often now, and he was doing it more from superstition than from belief. He had begun to doubt Marcus White again. He couldn’t seem to interest Captain Stewart in the indignity of soldiers being made to labor—Stewart only said that his own men were building a road, and weren’t Caesar’s men getting extra pay? And Lieutenant Martin said the same. He felt as if he had to carry the concerns of every man and woman in the Guides, and he had to bear them while remaining outwardly unmoved by Polly’s absence. Too many people already knew too much. There were so many who could have betrayed her, and he wondered at Marcus White’s curious confidence that no black would betray another. He knew blacks in Jamaica who had sold dozens of their brothers into bondage, or back to bondage. He looked at the company at morning muster and wondered if one of them could have sold Polly to the rebels.

  When they reached the outer post, they found Reverend White sitting quietly with a Bible, reading. Caesar sat next to him on a fence rail where he could see the road.

  “
She’ll come today,” said White, looking down the dusty pale road at the heat ripples in the distance.

  “Where have you been?” said Caesar. “Why didn’t you go with her?”

  Marcus White looked at him with eyes of sadness and pity.

  “Don’t you think I wanted to go with her, Julius?” he asked. “They almost know me now, Julius. There are one or two who might take me just for crossing the lines. They seldom molest women, or even question them. Men are different.”

  Van Sluyt sat quietly, but he was so upset that his hands shook.

  “They’ll hang my girl,” he said. “Or put her back to a slave, an’ I’ll never see her again.”

  Marcus White shook his head with a calm like that which Caesar had on the battlefield.

  “They’ll come today.”

  “Why?” asked Caesar, his tone more accusatory than he had intended.

  “I’ll tell you when they come.”

  They hadn’t come by midday. The sun beat down, and the Loyal Americans changed their guard, and the surly sergeant was replaced by a courteous one, and there were two black men in the platoon that came on duty. Caesar didn’t know them but he went to them somewhat mechanically and introduced himself. It passed the time.

  They didn’t come in the afternoon, although parties of women passed with eggs and geese, and one pair of very handsome girls leading a pig. None of them was black. None of them had come far, and most were just farm women taking things in for the market.

  They didn’t come in the evening. The Loyal Americans shared their mess kettle with good heart and Caesar ate well, sharing his tobacco and a little bottle of rum in return. Van Sluyt didn’t talk or eat, but simply sat on a rock by the side of the road and polished the lock of his musket over and over again. Marcus White began to walk down the road in little spurts. He walked forward a few paces as if to have a different view, and then farther and farther until he was almost at a musket shot from the post itself. All Caesar’s suspicions returned at the gallop and he followed into the gathering gloom, walking fast on the road in such an agitation of spirit that he realized that he had left his fowler propped against the stand of arms in the little post. He was unarmed except for his sword and Jeremy’s dagger.