“I’d never figure to find anything down along the bottom edge. I never search beyond ‘message ends.’” Jack looked up at Titus. “How’d she ever expect me to see it? What does it mean?”
“It means she didn’t expect for you to see it at all. That scribble is naught but a woman’s silly fancy.” Titus resumed stuffing gear into his haversack and gave Jack a nudge with the toe of his moccasin. “Get busy.”
Jack stayed on his haunches, still eyeing the drawing. “You’re right, Titus. She put this here knowing full well I would most probably never see it.”
Ned retrieved the hat Jack lost in the tussle with Titus. With a grin, he playfully exchanged headgear, plopping his turkey-feathered gustoweh onto Jack’s head. “Look, Uncle—Jack is one of us—ukwehu-wé—an Oneida man.”
So fixated on the scrap of paper in his hand, Jack didn’t even notice the exchange of hats.
“Time’s a-wastin’…” Titus swapped the hats back onto the proper heads. “Let’s go, Jack. Shred it, burn it, swallow it—I don’t care—but we need to make tracks, and I’m not about to travel with those pages.”
Jack looked up. “You all can go on without me… I’ll meet up with you tomorrow night in Stillwater.”
“I knew it!” Titus brought his fist down onto the haversack he was packing. “You are truly love-cracked, and seeing that Britisher captain talking with Mrs. Anne has put the devil in your head…”
“It’s not that, Titus.” Jack stood upright, tapping his finger to the drawing at the bottom of the page. “Something’s amiss—something troubling her—I know it.”
“Flapdoodle.” Titus threaded Jack’s arm through his rifle strap, settling the weapon on his friend’s shoulder. “You’re coming with us.”
“No—I’m going to see Anne.” Jack slipped the rifle off, letting it thud to the ground at his feet. “You are more than capable of delivering the message to Stillwater on your own.”
“And you are more than common stupid, Jack Hampton, to be even thinking about sneakin’ into that camp on your own.” Titus tugged hard at the red kerchief Jack wore tied about his neck, exposing a ribbon of angry scar tissue rippling round his throat. “Odds are against your cheating the hangman twice, brother.”
“Don’t you fret, Titus; I’ve a few lives left in me yet.” Jack jerked away, righting his kerchief and shirt collar to conceal his noose scar. “I don’t see why you’re putting up such a kick and stram, anyway. My staying behind is no more dangerous than anything else we’ve been at these past few weeks.”
Titus settled his bedroll diagonally across his back. “There’s no time for this nonsense. We’ve got to get this message to David’s ear, toot sweet.”
“Anne’s message has my eye—and I know, for some reason, she wants us together.” Jack held up the page with the crown, his dark brows knit in determination. “I pray you’re right, and it is just a silly fancy on her part—but there’s a chance she’s in some trouble, and I can’t leave before finding out which it is. I’m all for our cause, Titus, but I will not lose Anne to it.”
Titus whipped the leather strap through the buckle on his haversack, wrenching it tight. “What’s your plan, then?”
“I’ll go into the camp after dark…”
“Just stroll right in, will you?” Titus interrupted. “Alright. Let’s say somehow you manage to get past the pickets and the guardsmen—how do you expect to find Mrs. Anne in the dark, among thousands?”
“I’ll… I’ll find the baggage train, and then I’ll find Anne. I know her barrow. Once I find her and make sure all’s well, I’ll be on the road.”
“And if all isn’t well with Mrs. Anne?”
“Then we bring this business to a halt, and she and Sally come with me to Stillwater.”
Fully accoutered and ready to travel, Isaac said, “Your friend’s a hardheaded man, Titus.”
“Yep. Hard as hickory.” Titus poked Neddy in the shoulder. “This is all your doing—messin’ with that candle—so you can stay with him now, and see he keeps a scalp attached to his hard head.”
“Alright.” Neddy shrugged. “I’ll stay.”
Titus shouldered his haversack and took up his rifle. “I expect to see you both in Stillwater by twilight tomorrow—y’ hear me, Jack?”
“Don’t you worry, brother. We’ll be there.” Jack thumbed a cross over his heart. “I swear.”
Without a backward glance, Titus and Isaac took off at a trot and disappeared in a churn of greenery. Neddy shed his gear and announced, “I’m still hungry… You?”
Jack shrugged and took a seat at the fire ring, contemplating the little drawing at the bottom of the page he still held.
With tomahawk in hand, Ned left the fire, returning after a moment with a fair-sized sheet of bark he’d peeled from a nearby white pine. He sat next to Jack and nudged his griddle stone over the hottest coals. With a broad-blade knife honed to a razor edge, Ned proceeded to peel free the edible inner layer of bark from the rough outer bark. He cut the thin sheath of inner bark into uniform rectangles, each the width of two fingers, and no longer than the length of his hand.
Creasing a sharp fold just above Anne’s drawing, Jack tore the bottom inch from the page and tucked the scrap safe behind the leather band circling the crown of his hat. He floated the damning pages onto the coals, and sat motionless, watching the paper squirm and writhe and burst into flames.
“Titus has the right of it,” Ned said, breaking the silence. “Lots of coats down there—red, green, blue—won’t be no easy task, finding one little woman amid all that.”
Jack grunted in assent.
Ned arranged a dozen of the pine bark chips onto the hot stone, flipping each to toast both sides to a crisp golden brown. He plucked a cooked chip from the stone, and handed it to Jack.
“Eat.”
“Really? Tree bark?” Jack eyed the offer. The Indian scouts were prone to eating the oddest fare, but he found the wilderness edibles they harvested usually provided a welcome addition to their army rations of cornmeal and beans.
“G’won.” Ned smiled. “Roasted, it’s sweet.”
After taking the first bite, Jack reached for a second chip, and Ned asked, “Yawéku ka? Tastes good?”
“Yawéku ka.” Jack nodded. “First you got me to wearing moccasins, then making birdcalls, and now I’m eating tree bark—and liking it. Afore you know it, I’ll be forgoing breeches for a breechclout.”
Laughing, the Oneidan arranged another batch of chips on his griddle. “I aim to make you ukwehu-wé, Jack. When I’m done, your own woman won’t know you…” Ned glanced up at Jack. “Oho! That’s the way in, isn’t it? You’re sure dark enough for it…”
“Goddamn, Neddy Sharontakawas! If you aren’t one slippery Indian.” Jack tossed his hat off, fit Ned’s turkey-feather cap onto his head, and crossed his arms over his chest. “Shekóli, you bloodyback bastards!”
FOUR
What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly:— ’Tis dearness only that gives everything its value.
THOMAS PAINE, The American Crisis
IN CAMP—DARNING AND SCHOOLING
Evenfall found Anne and Sally cloistered inside their tent. They’d pitched their canvas alongside an orderly camp of Hessian dragoons, amid a sparse grove of popple and pine trees bordering the deepwood. A lone whippoorwill perched nearby and added comfort to the quiet night, trilling its name over the rough chorus of katydids and crickets.
Released from the stricture of her stays, and stripped down to muslinet shift, Anne settled cross-legged on her cot with her mending basket and hairbrush. After sweeping the boar bristles through her hair one hundred times, she plaited it for sleep, flipping the thick braid over her shoulder where it hugged the ridge of her spine. She stretched a silk stocking over a wooden darning egg and angled the eye of her needle toward the lantern light, pinching the thread through.
Down to her shift as well, Sally sat on her bed facing Anne, bare feet flat to the grou
nd. Chewing on the fuzzy end of her braid, she tapped a chalk pencil to the writing slate on her lap in time to the rolling chant of the whippoorwill’s call. Taap-tap-tap. Taap-tap-tap.
“I never paid much mind to birds back at the Cup and Quill,” Sally said, “but out here, I find I’m grown partial t’ th’ whippoorwill. It seems she follows us from camp to camp, na?”
“Mm-hmm…” Anne did not glance up from the series of satin stitches she sewed to bridge the small hole in the toe of her best pair of stockings. “She sings a pretty song, our whippoorwill.”
Sally dropped her chalk and leaned back on her hands. “Bab Pennybrig tells me she dreads the whippoorwill’s call. ’Tis a portent of death, she claims, and swears she heard it the night her Bill fell at Breed’s Hill.”
Anne began weaving the tip of her needle up and under the satin stitches. “Bab Pennybrig saying a thing doesn’t make it so.”
“Aye, tha’s true. Better to hear the whippoorwill’s sweet call than the snake’s rattle, I tolt her.” Sally set her slate aside. “Th’ snake’s rattle—now, there’s a true portent of death. Ye ken tha as well as I, d’ye not, Annie?”
Anne looked up from her darning. “I ken you ought take up your chalk and turn your mind to finishing your sums.”
Sally dragged her slate back onto her lap. “I hate sums! I’ll never be an arithmetician. I’ve no th’ knack for it.”
Six years before, when Sally was only fourteen years old, shod in wooden clogs and wrapped in a threadbare woolen shawl, she boarded a ship in Glasgow. Upon landfall in New York, Old Merrick purchased her indenture at the auction block and set the girl to work as a scullery maid in his household. Anne soon recognized that Sally owned a keen mind, and even though she knew it would rile her husband—for Merrick was not given to cosseting his servants—she determined to teach the illiterate girl to read and write.
Sally was an eager student and she quickly developed into a voracious reader, but the war had put a pause in the progress they had been making. Once ensconced in the British encampment, Anne seized on the idle night hours between supper and sleep as time devoted to expanding Sally’s schooling with the practice of penmanship and ciphering.
“For God’s sake, Sal, no one is expecting for you to become an arithmetician,” Anne said. “One day soon you’ll be helping David to run the Peabody Press, and I should think you might want to learn enough to manage and keep your own accounts. This war won’t last forever, you know.”
“Aye, Annie.” Resigned, Sally brought her legs up to sit tailor style and bent her head to the problems Anne had written out on her slate.
Ho-hoo… hoo… hooooh! An owl’s sudden hoot put an end to the whippoorwill’s soothing refrain.
Sally slapped her chalk down. “Fegs! Tha’ owl’s gone and scared our sweet whippoorwill away…”
Ho-hoo… hoo… hooooh!
“My!” Anne gazed upward. “Sounds as if he’s perched right above our heads.”
Ho-hoo… hoo… hooooh!
Sally groaned.
“Never mind the owl,” Anne said. “Just concentrate on finishing your sums.”
Tossing her slate to the side, Sally heaved a dramatic sigh. “I’m tellin’ you true, Annie, I canna muster a single thought for all this racket.”
Ho-hoo… hoo… HOOOOOH!
Sally hopped off her cot, gathering several pinecones from the floor. “I’ll chase him off…” Before Anne could stop her, she scooted through the tent flaps emitting a high-pitched, “Shoo! Shoo!”—the shrill cries followed by the thwack and roll of pinecones landing on the taut canvas overhead. “Shoo! Sho… mmmmph!!!”
Anne looked up at the odd stifled squeal. The tent flaps swept open, and with blue eyes as round as Dutch dinner plates, Sally was pushed inside, locked in the arms of a befeathered and tattooed Indian. Crouched in the tight confines of the wedge tent, the fierce savage struggled to keep squirming Sally constrained within the vise of his arms. With one hand clapped tight across her mouth, he muffled her distress.
The lantern hanging from the shaking ridgepole swung mad shadows over the quaking canvas. Anne fumbled under her pillow and, in an instant, produced her pistol. Arm extended ramrod stiff and the gun clasped in a two-handed grasp, she clacked back the hammer.
The Indian jerked his head back, his wild black hair flying. Flinging off his feathered headgear, he whispered, “Don’t shoot, Annie!”
Sally visibly calmed at the voice. Heart a-race, Anne leaned forward, her pistol trained as she focused on the savage’s tattooed face blinking in and out of the swinging light. She reached up to still the lamp, shining light on features made friendly by a familiar smile.
“Jack?!”
Jack flashed an even wider grin and gave Sally a little shake. “I’m going to let you loose, Sal,” he said in her ear. “Promise you won’t put up a fuss?”
Sally answered with a vigorous nod. As soon as Jack relaxed his hold, she stomped her heel down on his moccasined foot and sent a sharp elbow straight to his brisket.
“Ow!” Jack’s tattooed face renewed its fierceness in grimace.
“Tha’s what ye get fer scarin’ us witless.” Sally plopped down beside Anne.
“Goddamn it, Jack!” Anne uncocked her weapon and let it drop to her lap. “I was about to shoot!”
Jack positioned himself under the ridgepole with feet planted wide in order to fit his tall frame fully upright. Swiping back his long hair away from his face, he posed with fists resting at hips. “Convincing, eh?”
Anne and Sally shagged their heads up and down in brisk unison in admiration for Jack’s clever disguise.
The faded indigo shirt he wore was belted at the waist with a sash woven in a pattern of red and yellow braided wool. Voluminous shirtsleeves were cuffed with horn buttons, and cinched at biceps with armbands worked in pierced silver. His woolen breechclout was trimmed with a scallop of colorful bead- and ribbon work, and extended several inches beyond his long shirttails. Utilitarian buckskin leggings came to mid-thigh, and were secured below the knee with finger-woven garters. Anne was relieved to see he wisely kept the telltale noose scar concealed with a knotted red kerchief.
“At long last…” Sally stifled a giggle with her hand. “Yer bedecked and festooned like the heathen ye are.”
Worn loose as it was, Jack’s black hair was perhaps a bit too wavy for a full-blooded Indian, but the two thin braids he’d plaited at his right temple and tied off with beads and feathers helped aid the deception. To complete his disguise, three diagonal hatched lines rendered in indigo ink crossed his tanned face from hairline to jawline, and a stylized drawing of a bird in flight adorned his right cheek.
Brow furled, Anne stood and pointed to his face. “You didn’t really… ?”
“Not to worry…” Jack pressed his index finger to the tattoo and transferred a blue smudge to Anne’s face. “Paint. Neddy made it by boiling a scrap of sugar paper in bear fat.”
Anne sank back on her cot. “Neddy?”
“The younger of our Oneidan scouts. David charged two of them to work with us.”
Sally gave Jack’s shirttail a tug. “Yiv been with David? How’s he fare?”
“David’s fit as a fiddle and busy being Schuyler’s right hand, keeping what passes for the Continental Army of the North together—no easy task, that. I saw him last when we delivered the courier you two uncovered.”
“And it was David who put you in the company of savages?” Anne asked.
“Ned and Isaac are no savages. I’d wager pounds to pennies they know their Bible better than any in this tent.”
Sally was skeptical. “The British claim th’ tribes all gather beneath the King’s banner…”
“Except the Oneida and Tuscarora have fallen in with us rebels.” Dropping down, Jack took a cross-legged seat at the women’s feet. “Good thing, too—they’re valuable allies—master woodsmen, crack shots, fierce fighters, and now, good friends. Titus and I learn daily from Isaac and Ned.” Jac
k hooked a thumb under the beaded strap crossing his chest. “These are Ned’s clothes.”
Anne shifted forward in her seat. “What happened with the courier you delivered to David?”
“We found a message hidden in his canteen, just as you said we would. Due to your good work here, General Howe will never receive that message.”
“And the courier… ?”
“Captured as a spy and hung for one.”
“Och!” Sally drew her shawl over slumped shoulders.
“We were hoping that maybe he’d be spared. You see,” Anne explained, “the courier’s sweetheart was the one who revealed his true purpose to us.”
“Th’ poor lass.” Sally sighed. “So worried for her man, she is, and doesna ken it was she who sealed her lover’s ill fate…”
“Strung up like a common criminal…” Anne said with a shake of her head.
Sally added, “And they were soon to wed…”
“Stop it!” Grabbing them each by the knee, Jack said, “We are spies. We lie, we cheat, we steal, we take advantage—our task is dangerous and thankless, but every bit of information we glean and anything we can exploit is crucial to our country’s survival.” He took in a big breath. “Ensconced among these British, you two have no ken to how desperate our cause has become. Our army is outmatched and outgunned at every turn and sorely lacks supply and matériel. Our soldiers are daily deserting by the drove. The only way we can ever hope to defeat the British Empire is by our wits, and without intelligence, we are doomed to fail. You must both keep your minds, eyes, and ears ever tuned to that which aids our cause, no matter the unsavory consequences. Do you hear me?”
Duly chastised, Sally and Anne both nodded vigorously, and Anne slipped her hand over Jack’s. “We left an important message today…”
“Under a big maple—with a ribbon marker. Did ye no’ find it?” Sally asked.
“We found it—awful important it is, too. Titus and Isaac are on their way to David. I was set to travel with ’em but when I saw this…” Jack dug into the pouch at his hip and produced the drawing of the reunited crown. “I thought maybe you needed to see me…”
The Turning of Anne Merrick Page 9
