Since now ‘tis raised above thee
Not all the beauty thou cost own
Can make me love thee.”
Most of the time his recitation’s were quieter, but no less Melancholy.
“Goodnight, my love, may gentle rest
Charm your senses till the light
Whilst I with care and woe opprest
Go to inhabit endless night.”
The third or fourth time he murmured this, Kate lost her temper. “You will do no such thing,” she said, “you noodle-headed son of a bitch after all my trouble to save your damn life.”
Lieutenant Rawdon lay there, as silent as death itself for a long moment. With his eyes still closed, he murmured, “What did you say, dearest?”
“I am not your dearest, and I called you a damn silly noodle.”
“But you care enough about me to curse me.”
“I am cursing the time I’ve spent on you, when all the while it seems you are in love with dying.”
“I am cured,” be said. “Tomorrow I will get up.”
The next day, Rawdon ate a big breakfast and reiterated his determination to Dr. Davie. The old man was appalled. Two days ago, he had read in Rawdon’s skittering pulse the intimation of early death.
“It’s much too soon to test your strength, laddie,” he said. “There is no rush.”
“I am determined to prove to Miss Stapleton that I do not want to die - even if it kills me.”
“What?” said Dr. Davie. “What sort of nonsense have you. been talkin’ with this lad, my girl?”
By this time, Rawdon had struggled erect in bed and put his feet over the side. He stared down at these appendages and spoke to them very solemnly. “Feet,” he said, “you are good soldiers, even if everything above you is a military mistake. You are hereby ordered to place your soles firmly on the floor and march.” He put his left foot on the floor, and then his right foot beside it.
“Now legs, do your duty, no matter how much you dislike it.”
He tried to take a step and nothing happened. He swayed like a birch tree in a windstorm. With a cry, Kate ran to him and threw her arms around him. He reciprocated and they were locked in an embrace seldom seen in a sickroom.
“I begin to think,” said Dr. Davie sarcastically, “that you know more about strategy and tactics than you wish to admit, Lieutenant.”
Rawdon ignored him. “Today I will walk two steps with your help,” he told Kate. “Tomorrow four, the next day eight, the next day sixteen. Before you know it we shall have reached infinity, which is synonymous with heaven according, to some philosophers.”
“Tell it to your feet,” said Kate. “I don’t think they are listening.”
He leaned over, balancing himself on Kate’s arm, and exhorted his immobilized extremities once more. “Feet, I am ashamed of you. Another moment and I will not be able to believe you are English feet. Your duty to your country is clear. Can you hesitate to obey the patriot’s call? Consider those toes, ready and willing to die for their country, regretting only that there are but ten of them. As noble as Cato lamenting that single life he was so eager to lose for Rome. Feet, remember what you stand for, the Constitution, English liberty, Protestantism. Can any honest God-fearing feet ignore such responsibility?”
Jonathan Gifford happened to arrive at the doorway of the room in the middle of this soliloquy. Dr. Davie looked at him and muttered, “I think the fever’s settled in his brain.”
Jonathan Gifford shook his head. “Celtic blood, that’s all.” The expression on Kate’s face - a mixture of amusement and affection - pleased him immensely. He took Dr. Davie by the arm and led him downstairs to worry over a bottle of Madeira.
Upstairs, Kate found it impossible to be the stern nurse, as Rawdon went on lecturing his feet. “If you don’t stop,” she said, “I will let you go and you will dash your mad brains out upon the floor.”
“Wait, I think they are responding. England’s honor may yet be saved.”
He took one, two tiny steps, then gave up any pretense of standing erect and collapsed. It took all Kate’s strength to stagger back to the bed with him. He toppled on the pillows and murmured, “Thank God for American Amazons.”
“Mr. Rawdon,” Kate said, “I will not tolerate for one instant any goddamn English condescension from you.”
“Condescension?” he murmured. “The Amazons were noted for their beauty as well as their strength. If I remember my mythology correctly, the queen of the Amazons sought to marry Ulysses, or was it Ajax? Or perhaps Achilles. My name is Thomas. It means twin. We are famous neither for wisdom nor statecraft nor courage. Our forte is doubting. We have a most peculiar quirk. We love to be called by our name. Would you deign to do that, Your Majesty? A dying man - and a man struggling not to die - can command certain privileges. Would you call me - Thomas?”.
“I will think about it,” said Kate and began marching from the room.
“It will do me more good than the combined wisdom of the entire medical faculty of Edinburgh - just to hear it now.”
Kate paused in the doorway, half-wanting to laugh and still inclined to be stern, and ending as neither. “Go to sleep, Thomas,” she said.
IF KEMBLE so vehemently disapproved of his sister’s dancing with British officers, his outrage would have been spectacular if he had known what was happening in Lieutenant Rawdon’s sickroom. But he had no time to pay attention to that private struggle between love and death. He and the rest of New Jersey were too busy coping with a much older, more public passion - war. The sweet warm days of May and early June promised prime campaigning weather. Travelers from Amboy and New Brunswick reported strong signs that the royal army was preparing to march. Wagons and horses were being hired and forage scoured from the already stripped farms around both towns. Finally, the German and British regiments that had been garrisoned in Perth Amboy streamed up the road to New Brunswick to join the head of the army there.
Their numbers utterly cowed our militia. Kemble could only watch the long line of march from an upper-floor window of Liberty Tavern, his face gray with frustration. His father joined him and named the regiments as they passed. The kilted striding Scots of the 42nd Highlanders, the famed Black Watch, the 23rd, the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, the elite Foot Guards, preceded by their band in immaculate white uniforms. Jonathan Gifford noted that the officers no longer wore any insignia, and they had abandoned their silver gorgets and red sashes. It was a concession to the Americans’ penchant for aiming at them in battle.
In the center of the column rode a big bulky man on a bay horse, surrounded by a cluster of officers. “That’s General Howe,” Jonathan Gifford said, recognizing him at once. There was just enough family resemblance - particularly the swarthy complexion - to make the identification. The General was anything but a carbon copy of the older brother Jonathan Gifford had served. He was closer to a crude imitation, with a heavy fleshy face and a mouth much more disillusioned and sensual than the one Jonathan Gifford remembered. But the Captain realized he was judging a man in his late forties, a man who had spent the intervening years in London dissipation. Perhaps Lord George Howe would look like that if he had lived. Who knew what the years would do to any man? If someone had told Jonathan Gifford in 1758 that he would grow weary of army life and become a domesticated husband and father, he would have challenged him for impugning his honor.
Did General Howe stop and exchange a word or two with his brother’s old friend? No, Howe probably did not know that Jonathan Gifford existed. The commander in chief of a great army lived an insulated life, surrounded by swarms of majors, colonels, and brigadiers. Watching the General and his suite ride past, Captain Gifford could not help remembering George Washington’s impromptu visit a year ago. He liked the easy, open style of the American commander in chief and his half-dozen boyish, smiling aides.
There was something oppressive, ominous about Howe, with his solemn dissipated face, his cloud of aides, and his heavy battalions. He did
not look like a man who ever had much interest in reconciling Britain and America. In fact, according to Moncrieff and other officers, the General frankly admitted as much and blamed his older brother, the Admiral, for the carrot and stick campaign of 1776.
The following day, a stocky, balding Scot named John Honeyman appeared in Liberty Tavern and asked for Jonathan Gifford. Standing at the bar, he identified himself loudly as a butcher and asked Jonathan Gifford if he was interested in fresh meat. He shook his head. Liberty Tavern raised its own livestock.
“Washington sent me,” Honeyman said in a much more confidential tone. “He’s desperate to know what the British have in mind. Will they go to Philadelphia by water or land? Or up the Hudson to meet Burgoyne and his Canadians? It’s a tough spot he’s in because he must march every foot of the way while they can use water.”
Jonathan Gifford passed the word to Kemble, and he soon had some twenty dependable militiamen bringing information to the secret room he had fitted out in the rear of the tavern’s cattle barn. But the information was confusing. The British seemed to be simultaneously advancing, and retreating. Boats filled with soldiers and women were pouring down the Raritan to board transports waiting at Perth Amboy. Regiments from Staten Island and New York continued to join the concentration at New Brunswick.
Washington was so uneasy, three more spies passed through Liberty Tavern in the next week, quizzing Jonathan Gifford. He had been pumping British army officers who stopped in the tavern. But even friends like Moncrieff confessed they were as baffled by Sir William Howe’s intentions as everyone else.
As the last of these spies, a young, very aristocratic lieutenant from Philadelphia, explained his mission to Jonathan Gifford, a rumbling sound from the road interrupted them. They went to the door of the tavern and saw a strange procession. Over forty huge flatboats, each capable of carrying sixty men, were moving up the road on wagon frames.
“If that doesn’t mean they are marching for the Delaware, I don’t know what it means,” said the Philadelphian.
“It could mean that or it could be General Howe’s way of tempting General Washington to battle. If I were you, I would see what he does with them after they get to New Brunswick.”
The Philadelphian condescendingly disagreed. He felt the flatboats were all the proof he needed. He leaped on his horse and rode back to Washington without even bothering to visit Perth Amboy, where the taverns were full of talkative British sailors from the transports in the harbor.
That night, Jonathan Gifford mentioned the flatboats to Kemble and Barney. “Someone’s got to get inside the New Brunswick camp,” Kemble said.
“It won’t be you. Moncrieff and God knows how many loyalists would recognize you.”
“I’ll ‘go it,” said Barney. “I could pretend - ”
“They trust Irishmen even less than they trust twenty-year-old Americans.”
“Sam?” said Kemble.
“How about an ex-British officer, who’s a little low on rum and wonders if the commissary general has any to spare?”
The next morning, when Black Sam brought Jonathan Gifford’s chaise to the door of the tavern, Kemble was sitting in it. “If you find out anything, Washington ought to hear about it as fast as possible,” he said.
Jonathan Gifford nodded reluctantly. Kemble was right. But it was dangerous. If Anthony Skinner or his friends saw him they would arrest him instantly. He decided not to argue. He flicked the reins and Narragansett Jack went up the road to Brunswick at his usual brisk pace.
The town was almost deserted. During the night the British army had marched toward the Delaware. Jonathan Gifford found the British commissary general and introduced himself, carefully dropping names of friends such as Moncrieff and Harcourt. He asked the Commissary, a rotund, red-faced man named Haliburton who looked as though he ate triple rations daily, if he would be willing to sell him some rum.
“I’m almost dry and I see that you are about to make a march. I thought you might want to lighten your supply.”
Commissary General Haliburton huffed and puffed and said that while it was irregular to do such business, it was not impossible. Jonathan Gifford gave him a hundred pounds in hard money and the Commissary’s cordiality increased spectacularly. He assured Jonathan Gifford that the rum would be ready for him in an hour. Meanwhile, would he like to have dinner with him? Father and son sat down in the Commissary’s tent to a feast of flesh and fowl and good wine which Haliburton drank in large quantities.
“I suppose you don’t have a spare wagon left in the camp?” Jonathan Gifford said. “I found my own has a crack in its front axle and I will have a devil of a time borrowing one.”
“No trouble, no trouble at all. You can borrow one from me. Just have it back here by sundown tomorrow.”
“I thought the General had set out for the Delaware.”
“If he has,” said the Commissary with a twinkle in his eyes, “he is traveling damn light. He has not a baggage nor a provision-wagon with him nor one of those flatboats which he moved here from New York at such tremendous expense.”
Jonathan -Gifford pretended to be amazed. “What is his plan?”
“If he has one, it is to get Washington down from those damn hills and fight him to a finish. But I don’t believe General Washington will be so stupid, do you?”
Jonathan Gifford shrugged. If Commissary Haliburton wanted to praise General Washington, why should he object?
An hour later they were selecting a wagon and hitching a team to it. Around them were several hundred wagons and just beyond these the squadron of flatboats. The moment they were outside New Brunswick, Kemble told his father to stop the wagon. He was going to cut across country and get their discovery to General Washington without wasting an hour. As an ex-soldier, Jonathan Gifford knew how dangerous it was for a civilian to wander through a countryside contested by two rival armies. It was late in the day. A spring chill rose from the shadowy fields. Kemble might have to spend the night in the woods. He was not even wearing a cloak. A father’s concern crowded cautionary words to Jonathan Gifford’s lips.
He stifled them. Kemble would go anyway. Let him go as a friend, a comrade. “Good luck,” he said and held out his hand.
Jonathan Gifford did not get much sleep that night. He saw Kemble falling before the gun of a quick-triggered sentry, perhaps American, perhaps British. Arrested, hanged as a spy. The next day wore away, full of bright hot sunshine, with no Kemble. In the taproom Captain Gifford tried to look interested as Samson Tucker and his friends discussed the war.
The British and the loyalists were more confident now than they were in 1776. They had dismissed Washington’s victories at Trenton and Princeton as flukes. This year, 1777, was the year of the gallows, they said, pointing to the three sevens. They were going to smash the Americans everywhere. The fleet was blockading every port on our coast. One royal army was descending from Canada, to break American resistance on the northern front. The main army was supposed to capture Philadelphia, then march north to join the Canadian army for an assault on the stronghold of the rebellion, New England.
“What do you think, Captain?” asked John Tharp, the burly ex-Quaker turned militiaman. He had been exiled from his father’s house and ostracized by his Quaker neighbors. He was living at the Fitzmorris farm, working as a badly needed hand. Nathaniel Fitzmorris was still in prison. “Will General Howe march to join the Canadian army after he takes Philadelphia?”
“If he does, it will be a damn long hike. That’s what makes America so hard to conquer. It’s a big country.”
Jasper Clark came in with a letter from his oldest son, a captain in the New Jersey brigade of the Continental army. “He says Washington is ready to fight. They are not going to let them ramble to Philadelphia.”
Listening, Jonathan Gifford was amazed to discover how much his detestation of a royal victory had deepened. How had it happened? he asked himself again. It had something, perhaps everything to do with that thin dete
rmined face beside the wheel of the wagon, glaring up at him, defiantly declaring his determination to become a man. He had to help him reach, discover, create - however it was done - that manhood. The need to share his strength with this boy-man cut through all the ambiguity of King’s men and Congress’s men, cut through to the heart.
Just after dark that night, a young man about Kemble’s age appeared in the taproom of Liberty Tavern. He was wearing an expensive dark blue cloak that looked vaguely familiar to Jonathan Gifford. Where had he seen it? Yes - on the shoulders of George Washington. The stranger had a large head on a short stocky body; his eyes were alive with intelligence and a surprising degree of self-confidence for so young a man.
In the tavern office, the visitor introduced himself as Colonel Alexander Hamilton, one of General Washington’s aides. “The General sends you his warmest regards. He wants you to know that your son is safe but a little sick. He got lost and spent most of the night in the woods. We intend to keep him with us for a few days. The news he brought was exactly what we needed and hoped to hear.”
“I am sure you will make good use of it,” Jonathan Gifford said. “Tell the General how much I appreciate his thoughtfulness.”
Hamilton nodded. “I volunteered to reconnoiter the situation in Perth Amboy. So far we have gotten nothing but nonsense from the coxcombs we sent there. I only wish I was getting paid as well as they are.”
For five days Sir William Howe and his generals maneuvered around central New Jersey, attempting to lure Washington down from the high ground around Middlebrook. General Washington sat tight. Now that he knew the British did not intend to march for Philadelphia, he saw no point in risking his army to attack them. Let the British attack him. On the steep slopes of the Watchung .Mountains they would pay dearly for it. Meanwhile, every ounce of food shipped from New Brunswick was exposed to violent harassment from American regulars and Morris County militia.
At the close of this week of stalemate, Daniel Slocum burst into the taproom of Liberty Tavern with the electrifying news that the British were retreating. At first no one would believe him. “They are on the march,” he said. “I saw the head of their column pass New Brunswick. They should reach here in three hours at most.”
The Heart of Liberty Page 28
