Mrs. Loring couldn’t join him by carriage. The roads weren’t safe. And so she and her chariot, her maid, her furniture, and sixteen trunks of clothes had to sail from our island to Philadelphia on the Isis, a man-o’-war. There had been wild stories about Sir William and milady, and their so-called concubinage, how he’d come to Boston two years ago, discovered Mrs. Loring at a regimental ball, bent her over a table and rogered her in full view of his officers. But Mrs. Loring had a different tale to tell. She’d first met Billy during the Indian wars, when she was a child of seven—the daughter of a prominent Boston doctor—and he a young captain or lieutenant colonel in the colonies. She would ride with him and her family in her father’s carriage, and he so gentle and gallant that her own mother took to calling him “the savior of Massachusetts.” Mrs. Loring confessed she could never love another man after meeting Billy, tho’ he was not quite so gentle now.
She cried when I saw her for the last time in her yellow birdcage. “Johnny One-Eye, I am loath to leave Manhattan.”
“But the citizens have not been kind to you here. They have been most rude. ’Tis almost as if they had banished you to Out Ward and Little Africa.”
“Worse, Johnny, far worse. I feel I’ve been living in a lazaretto, but you have been kind. And now your mother will have you all to herself.” “My mother?”
I had not informed her of my curious standing as Gertrude’s lost son.
“’Tis not such a fast secret, child.”
I was eighteen or nineteen, perhaps twenty, since my mother’s calendar was not to be trusted in matters of my birth. But I did not mind milady calling me her child.
“You are Gertrude’s boy, however hard she hides it. I would take you from her if I could, keep you on board the Isis. I’d have my Will find a place for you at headquarters.”
“Your Will does not like me.”
“He’s a soldier. He considers what can be useful to him and what cannot.”
“Useful?” I said. “I won’t be his spy.”
“Spies he has aplenty. But no one to converse with save Mortimer.”
“He has his brother, by God.”
“He does not get along with Dick. Dick never gambles. Dick prefers to dine on board a battleship.”
“But this war cannot go on forever. One side will win.”
“I am not so certain. Both sides might also lose.”
How prescient she was. Perhaps both sides had already lost—with killing and plunder as a permanent language. But I sought to calm milady.
“You can still take to the wind in your chariot, like the night riders.”
“You have no heart,” she said. “You tease, while I am in earnest. You are almost as cruel as my Will.”
Crueler perhaps, because I was not a general who could shove his army into ships, but a lad without much material, who had to live his life at a slant. I loved Clara but could never get beneath her skin. It was different with milady, who had but little hold over me. I did not have to mourn her yellow house. A changeling like myself did not belong to any house or farm, village, country, or continent. A duelist, as her husband had described me, a man who hid beneath a madrigal of words.
Mortimer had come from Philadelphia to accompany Mrs. Loring and help her pack. He would not stop crying.
“I’ve grown attached to ye, boy.”
I kissed him with as much passion as I could muster for a brute with a blackened mouth.
“Speak of Philadelphia,” I said. “There the water is sweet. That is what I am told.”
“Too sweet. A man could die of sweet water.”
“How, pray?”
“By overdrinking,” said the brute.
“Mortimer, that is a monstrous tale.”
“Monstrous or not, I have seen men die at the wells, keel over and die in the middle of pumping water. And there are nunneries, but not an entire street, nothing that could hold a candle to Holy Ground. My general is sore to find another host for his card game.”
“I thought he had given up vingt-et-un.”
“Not in Philadelphia. The games are held at headquarters. But they lack a…I cannot locate the word. They suffer from an absence of Mrs. Jennings. How many times has my general said, ‘Mort, ’tis mere trickery without Gertrude.’”
I was loath to say adieu to Mortimer and Mrs. Loring. I took my last carriage ride with her and Mort right down to where the Isis was docked.
“Goodbye, Elizabeth,” I said, suddenly free to pronounce her Christian name.
AUTUMN BODED ILL for the rebels. George Washington had to skulk about in the woods not far from Philadelphia, survive without sweet water, deal with mutiny. He had yet another danger. Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne was going to build a human bridge between Albany and Philadelphia, capture Washington within a relentless chain of redcoats, supplied by Sir William and himself—and the rebels would have to surrender without their farmer in chief. But Burgoyne never got to Albany. He had to abandon his baggage train, and his Indians abandoned him, those scalpers who had terrified the whole Hudson Valley. He crossed the Hudson in mid-September with five thousand men. His camp followers had devoured most of the food, and the men were starving. He still dreamed that Sir William would join him soon, and felt he had no need of extra rations. His own messengers had misled him, or at least the message he wanted to hear never arrived. He was stopped at Saratoga, with General Arnold leading a charge that cost him the use of his left leg, a leg that had already been bent in battle. Benedict Arnold had to be carried from this battlefield in a wheelbarrow.
Burgoyne surrendered whatever men he had and was allowed to sail home to England with a couple of his aides. And Sir William fortified himself in Philadelphia without Gentleman Johnny, shot quail with his officers, rode around with Mrs. Loring. “Sir Billy shut his eyes,” sang several critics, “drank his bottle, had his little whore”—I did not like this wanton caricature of Mrs. Loring—“and never read a single letter that he signed.”
But he did read one, a letter of resignation that he wrote near the end of October, while the oaks on Market Street began to turn a startling red that defied the war itself, and all of Philadelphia was like a momentary magic festival, despite Washington’s sharpshooters and the little fires that burnt at the edge of town. And since it would take his letter a month to cross the Atlantic and another month to be opened by the king, Billy had all the time in the world to plan a party at his mansion to welcome the New Year. I could sense that Saratoga spelled the end of British North America—Billy knew that Burgoyne’s debacle would embolden France to recognize this runt of a republic, and with France came the French fleet. King George would have to protect his own interests in the Caribbean, and thirteen rebellious colonies did not seem quite so valuable as sugar plantations. The king’s sugar islands brought in more revenue than a hundred Manhattans. “Sugar was God, sugar was gold,” Billy loved to blaspheme.
Hence, he turned his mansion into a gambling den for his little soirée, with a whole floor devoted to vingt-et-un. He dressed Mortimer in silver and gold trim, had him lug a mountain of specie from his own Philadelphia coffers. But he didn’t have Gert or the other nuns of Holy Ground to mingle with his honored guests. Nor did he have Gert’s splendid octoroon, the lass with the green eyes who had nearly wrecked Black Dick. He thought to kidnap Clara, I would imagine, but he did not want a scandal to mark his last months as commander in chief.
The reports that Gert got back from William’s own officers are proof that his end-of-year party flumped. Mrs. Loring served punch and purple champagne. She wore a dress of silver lamé that occupied a whole battalion of women’s tailors for nine weeks. But she moved like a ghost in silver lining—she must have realized that Billy would never take her to England, that he could not, considering his own entanglements with family, king, and court. And perhaps Billy himself began to feel like an apparition. He drank his purple champagne, toasted 1777 and the New Year, but with little enchantment in his eyes, little delight. That is
what his captains swore to Gert.
But I had other news—a note that Elizabeth Loring’s Philadelphia seamstress had smuggled into Manhattan somehow. It contradicted the reports of Will’s own captains.
Johnny, I do not much enjoy the riches of Philadelphia while Mr. Washington and his army are close to starvation and cannot leave their tents and little huts in the wilderness for want of coats and shoes. Will’s whore I may be, but I won’t rejoice at their misfortune. These men are not my enemy. Some have wandered into Philadelphia like half-crazed horses. I have commandeered Mortimer, who has much the same pity, tho’ he is at war with these men. I use my rights and privileges as William’s war wife (you once described me thus) to ride into no-man’s-land and deliver food and clothes to rebel pickets. I pray such pickets are not scoundrels and will bring the provisions to Valley Forge.
My angel, Mortimer, encourages me to declare how much we miss you. He curses the gods of his childhood that he was never taught to spell properly, even during his tenure with Will. And so I bid you adieu from both of us.
Yr. Obedient and Loving Servants,
Elizabeth and Mortimer.
The Divil himself could have pulled tears from an epistle such as that. I now read William’s end-of-year party in a different light. Neither Mort nor Elizabeth Loring must have enjoyed the splendor of purple champagne. They had simply gone through the motions for their William. Mort couldn’t have been content in silver sleeves while Washington’s lads lived without shoes. Mort was a civilian warrior who would gladly kill a man, but he was not a demon.
And Elizabeth? Did she pretend to stuff herself at the soirée all the while she was storing up provisions in some secret basket? William’s cold cuts must have helped provide nourishment in the wilderness. I like to think that Elizabeth was radiant at the party, not a ghost, but a warm-blooded woman who glided across William’s waxed floor in her slippers, knowing there would be less hunger at Valley Forge for the next few nights.
Anno Domini 1778
SILVER BULLETS AND THE BLACK BRIGADE
Valley Forge
JANUARY 1778
His new winter quarters were twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia as the crow flies. Valley Forge was not a town with a town’s provisions. ’T was “a cold, bleak hill,” where men were obliged to sleep “under frost and snow without clothes or blankets,” his own officers would complain. He could have occupied some village near Philadelphia, but he would also have had to scatter its inhabitants and create a horde of vagabonds and refugees. And so he set about to build a city of tents for an army that was itself a little nation of vagabonds.
His men were starving and he had to maraud—but he’d not attack neighboring towns. He would harass and alarm General Howe in his Philadelphia haven, and pillage Howe’s supply trains. He had in truth become the robber in chief.
So long as his men slept in tents, he too would sleep in a tent. He helped them hammer and saw at their huts, shared whatever scraps of food he had. Horses seemed to starve faster than men—his camp was littered with rotting carcasses. There was blood in the snow from the naked feet of his men. And as he moved about Valley Forge, with icicles in his hat, he could hear the boys chant, “No pay, no clothes, no provisions, no rum.”
The robber in chief pondered to himself—where the Divil could he scare up some rum? He returned to his own tent, slapped the icicles off his hat, lay down without taking off his boots, weary as he was, like some worn-out strumpet. And he started to dream without shutting his eyes, could feel his own fingers in a tangle of red hair, as if Gertrude sat right beside him. The palpability of it frightened Washington, conjuring up an apparition with a heartbeat he could hear. But this apparition soon vanished with all her freckled skin. Perhaps he should only cavort with creatures of solid flesh. He could have found a wench but wanted none—the redhead he craved was in Manhattan, rivers and rivers away.
Thirty-Two
WE HAD FIVE MONTHS OF TRANQUILITY ON OUR little island while Sir William sat in Philadelphia with his high command. Soldiers plundered, bread was scarce, but the Brits did not maraud on Robinson Street. We did have a visit tho’ from one of the king’s representatives: Simon, the royal chimney sweep, appeared at the Queen’s Yard with his little parcel of slaves, and while they crept up the chimneys with their brooms, he drank sassafras tea in the parlor and ogled every nun.
“Simon,” Clara asked, “do you ever pay any of your assistants?”
“You don’t pay a picanniny,” he said. “You give ’em cold tea and a kick in the pants.”
I had to keep Clara from strangling him. But she shamed the son of a bitch. She shucked off her clothes and crawled up the chimneys with the little colored sweeps, who could not have been older than nine or ten. Simon realized soon enough that Clara was never lovelier than when she was covered in soot. It made him delirious to watch her lithe form glistening with black dust.
I was equally delirious but could not show it. Clara would have read my rampant desire as a betrayal of her—she was punishing the royal sweep, wanted him to feed on his own heart. He offered her a month of profits, all of which derived from the labor of his little sweeps, if he could accompany Clara into her closet for five minutes.
I waited for Clara to impugn the royal sweep and laugh in his face. But she bartered with him instead.
“I will give you fifteen minutes, Simon, fifteen, if you crawl up a chimney with your lads.”
“Clara, darling, I am much too fat.”
But in his folly he went into the flues and was stuck there for one unholy hour. Clara suggested we saw off his legs, but I applied a tub of lard to his person and we managed to pull him out. Neither Simon nor his little sweeps ever went near the nunnery again.
THUS WE LIVED from January to June, away from the Brits, without a single tax collector or picket coming here to plague Gertrude and the nuns. But our tranquility, our freedom from the British lion, did not last. The French fleet suddenly appeared off Manhattan in the middle of June and blockaded our port. Victuallers from London could not supply the British lords and ladies on our island with tubs of marmalade and wheels of cheese for two entire weeks. And now the panic spread. Pickets arrived on Robinson Street and perused the denizens of Holy Ground as potential spies. Did their commandant imagine we were signaling to the French fleet?
I couldn’t even climb to the tower at King’s College and have a proper look. King’s was now a hospital and rest home for decrepit British officers. I had to sneak upstairs to Gert’s verandah with my spyglass and probe the harbor without attracting attention from the pickets. ’T was a most puny fleet, more like tubs than battleships, and utterly removed from the British armada that lay off Staten Island two years ago with its wonder of cloth and wood.
Then one morning the French fleet disappeared, as if it had been but a mirage. And soon we had another mirage, an army that materialized right out of the dust, at the beginning of July. I had never seen soldiers so forlorn, moving like ragamuffins rather than men of the line. Some were without shoes. At first I thought they belonged to one of Washington’s ghostly regiments, but within all the hurly-burly I began to hear British fifes and drums; drummer boys themselves emerged from the dust, as bedraggled as the rest.
And then a portly man appeared on a horse—ye gods, he looked like some pony rider from a circus. He had a most comical paunch and smallish eyes. I was astounded to learn that this hatless pony rider was Sir Henry Clinton, the new commander in chief. He no more resembled Sir William than a hare might resemble a hound.
Our William, it seems, had sailed home to Mother England near the end of May. And Clinton abandoned Philadelphia in June, began his march back to York Island, meeting George Washington along the way—’t was Washington who bloodied Clinton at Monmouth, scattered his drummer boys, riding across the battlefield on a white horse. The farmer in chief lacked the matériel to destroy Clinton’s army, but his lads did manage to rob a good many redcoats of their shoes.
And here was Sir Henry coming out of the July dust.
My mentor, Sir Harold Morse, would tutor me in the habits of Henry Clinton. His long silences, Harold said, were notorious. His wife had died several years ago, and Clinton became all but a recluse. He was barely civil to his own officers. But he was obsessed with one thing—a secret service.
FOR THIS HE WOULD SOON count on Sir Harold himself, commandant of the Black Brigade, who had remained invisible while Sir William was commander in chief. Clinton was much less suspicious of Harold. Perhaps he was touched that Harold had risen out of nowhere, that the king had found him in a forest. Perhaps the silence of Harold’s life succored his own silence. But Harold would meet with him at his headquarters on Broadway, near the Bowling Green. And Harold began to bring me along—’t was a veritable fortress, with pickets stationed every five or six feet. The floor was made of marble that shone like a mirror: I could see my own quizzical face in the mirror, a lad in the lion’s den.
We were ushered into the war room, where Clinton was waiting. The only other person at this audience was Clinton’s young adjutant, Major John André, a swarthy man-killer with the air of an educated Gypsy. Clinton gazed upon this boy as if he were some miracle. I did not understand at first. Major André was most petulant. He strutted across the room with such a scowl I thought he meant to bite us. His hold on Sir Henry, I would soon discover, was much more insidious than any hold little Hamilton might have had on George Washington. He’d ingratiated himself with Clinton to such a degree that no one else could get near the general. Major André had managed to isolate him utterly from the rest of mankind. He humored Harold and myself, considering us as little more than Clinton’s personal clowns.
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