Hamilton's Battalion

by Courtney Milan

  Why had this eventuality not occurred to her when she invited Nathan to dinner? Why had she kept the ring in the first place? Oh, she’d come up with a hundred excuses she could have fed to Nathan in an argument, even though she’d never expected to see him again. For instance: They won’t expect me to romance anyone if they think I have a sweetheart at home.

  But in truth, when it came to it, she didn’t know why. She just hadn’t been able to leave every scrap of herself behind.

  She stuck her thumb inside her collar and pulled the ribbon out, not meeting Nathan’s eyes. Her wedding ring dangled, a plain gold circle that could have meant anything. He was the only person on earth who would recognize it.

  There was silence.

  “Well?” Tench said. “Do you know whose it is? He won’t say, which is how we know it must belong to a girl.”

  “It did belong to a girl,” Nathan said slowly.

  Rachel shoved the ring back inside her collar, feeling guilty for smearing crab on it. Treyf. Her fingers shook. There were so many damn rules, how was she supposed to know which ones mattered? Which shame was nonsense and which was the voice of her soul?

  Tench leaned forward. “What was her name?”

  “Rachel.” Her head jerked up before she realized Nathan wasn’t talking to her. “I, um, I loved her too, actually. But she chose Ezra.” He tugged at a stray piece of thread on his waistcoat pocket. “It broke my heart at the time, but I think I understand why now.”

  Every cannonade from the trenches echoed in her chest. Boom. Boom. Boom.

  “Why?” Tench pressed.

  Nathan grinned. “Because he’s taller than I am.”

  Rachel let out her pent-up breath in a startled laugh. “That wasn’t why.”

  “Well, go on,” Scipio prompted. “Tell us about her. Is she beautiful?”

  She actually wanted him to do it. To talk about the girl she’d been. But he didn’t. “Pass my pepper,” he said innocently, and ignored all further attempts to pry information out of him.

  After dinner, she escorted him silently back to the guardhouse, bayonet fixed for show. She couldn’t look at him. She wanted to blurt out, Do you still think I’m beautiful? She traced her faint mustache self-consciously, and hoped he didn’t notice.

  “Rachel,” he said quietly. “Stop for a moment.”

  She started, glancing around for anyone who might have heard him use her name. “Nathan.”

  “There’s no one in earshot. I checked.”

  To her surprise, she believed him. She made herself meet his gaze. “What is it?”

  “I…if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t do the same thing. I’d give money anonymously to the rabbi to pay for your mother’s doctors, instead of asking you to marry me.”

  He shoved his curls out of his eyes, restlessly, but he looked her in the eye. “It didn’t occur to me then, and if it had I don’t know that at that age I’d have had the courage to hide money from my mother, but…it’s what I should have done. I’m sorry. You were right. I thought only of myself. I generally do. My nerves make so much noise I can’t always hear other people. I should try harder. I should have tried harder with you. Sorry, I’ll stop talking.”

  He’d been thinking about what she said? Really thinking about it? She looked at her boots. “Thanks.”

  She was even more shocked when he waited silently to see if she had anything else to say.

  She tried to imagine her life if he had done that. Who would she be? Where would she be? Would she be someone else’s wife? A spinster seamstress in Philadelphia?

  Or would she be right here, but free? Free to marry one day and have children, free not to care about Nathan’s worried dark eyes, or his hands visibly fidgeting in his pockets. Maybe she wouldn’t even remember his name. Nathan Mendelson? It sounds familiar. I’m sure if I saw him I’d know who he was.

  She couldn’t decide what to say next: there were too many things on the tip of her tongue, and too many things she suddenly wanted to believe he’d do differently now. If you had it to do over again, what would you say to your mother when she suggested you divorce me?

  Rachel counted ten rounds from their new batteries before he nodded and set off towards the guardhouse.

  A stray thought from earlier came back to her. “Wait,” she got out, before she could think better of it. “I need to get something from my tent first.” He accepted the detour without question.

  She ducked under the tent flap and stood there, irresolute. She should duck back out and pretend she’d done something. This was too great a sacrifice, and why should she?

  Nathan poked his head into the tent, holding his hat in place with one hand. “So this is where you and your friends sleep.” He eyed the ground. “Five men fit in here? And Mrs. Goodenough? How do you avoid kicking each other in the night? How do they not—” He gestured at her breasts.

  Rachel flushed hot. Not everyone sleeps as restlessly as you do. She couldn’t say that. Just thinking it, just knowing what it was like to sleep next to him, was an unbearable intimacy.

  She turned away to root through her pack. “I worried about that too. But my—they’re small. Nothing’s happened.” The memory of his hands on her breasts felt tangible, so vivid he must see it too.

  “Enough is as good as a feast.” He snickered. “Sorry.”

  Her face flamed. The memory changed—he was suckling at her bosom, and then it wasn’t a memory anymore, but desire. She wanted to tear off her linen wrapping and press his unshaven face into her sensitized flesh.

  She elbowed him aside to get out without brushing up against him, gulping in night air. “Here. Tear this in half and wrap it around your ankles to pad them.”

  He looked at the bundle she’d shoved into his hands. “I can’t take this. How many extra shirts do you even have?”

  Just the one, and it was a precious commodity. Not having it meant that when Sarah was doing their mess’s washing, she’d have to wear her uniform against her naked skin, and it itched.

  “The war will be over in a few weeks. It’s fine.” She winced at the ripping sound as he tore it—easily; it had been worn to shreds anyway.

  It took him a few false starts to tie the linen snugly around his ankle. If she saw one of her men struggling like that with a bandage, she’d take it out of his hands and do it for him.

  She stuck her hands in her pockets and looked away. If she touched him, she’d have him back inside the tent in a flash, never mind that one of her messmates might stick his head in at any moment. Bruises or no, Nathan had a well-turned calf. She used to love how in the right light, if she was sitting close enough and he’d crossed one ankle over his knee, she could see the hairs peeking through his stockings. It was too dark for that now, thank God.

  He tied off the second ankle and stood, taking a careful step. An expression of surprised pleasure spread across his face. “Thank you,” he said earnestly. “Thank you.”

  She shrugged and shouldered her musket.

  October 10

  The next day at noon, their battalion marched to their posts in the trenches in a silence broken only by their drums and marching footsteps. The lack of cannon fire felt eerie, unnatural. The guns were the promise of their deliverance, beating Cornwallis into submission.

  New batteries had opened just this morning; the American artillery park stood half empty. Already the little town was visibly damaged by the Allied guns, the handsome manor house where Cornwallis had made his headquarters nothing but a windowless pile of bricks.

  The silence was on account of that house. It belonged to a rich old man named Nelson, and as a favor to his three sons, all American officers, Washington had asked for a ceasefire to get their father out of Yorktown.

  “If I were a Virginia man, I’d riot,” one of the men said in German. “For officers, we stop the whole war to rescue their father. ‘Oh, your father, Private? Don’t be so sentimental!’”

  “The cannon don’t cover your gossiping now,
” Rachel said sharply in Yiddish, with a meaningful glance at their own officers, some of whom spoke German. The soldiers rolled their eyes at her accent when they thought she wasn’t looking, but they shut up.

  After half an hour or so, an old white man made his careful, limping way out of the Yorktown gates to the American lines, aided by a black servant with a heavy bundle under one arm.

  A black soldier spat on the ground. “A good day to be Mr. Nelson’s favorite slave. The others will be fine, I’m sure.”

  “If he stayed, he might be free,” a friend pointed out. As the Allied cannon resumed firing, a tall chimney fell with a crash. “Ah…on second thought, I’ll take my chances here.”

  That was the prevailing sentiment in the trenches as the day wore on: it’s bad here, but God have pity on the English bastards. Less than a day after the opening of the Allied batteries, the British embrasures and platforms were so damaged they couldn’t protect their crews or support the weight of their guns, which one by one ceased firing. The Allied cannon poured shells and roundshot into the little town unopposed.

  The artillerymen in the American Grand Battery had heavy work, but the light infantry covering them had little to do but take it in turns to assist the pioneers in digging the second parallel—a shorter trench than the one behind it, carefully stopped short just out of range of the British redoubts’ mortar shells, if not quite their grapeshot or cannon—and watch for a sortie that never came.

  Sarah brought their supper at twilight: stringy boiled beef today and some bread that had not quite risen. Rachel knew bitter disappointment that Nathan did not come with her. For him to struggle all the way to the trench with shackled ankles would have been both painful and stupid, and she knew it. Yet the faint, unacknowledged hope that he might come—and he might speak, and he might look at her, and he might, even, laugh—had sustained her all day, more than the sure expectation of supper.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said: It broke my heart at the time, but I think I understand why now. Did he truly understand? She wanted to push him against a wall and make him repeat back to her what she had said to him, to explain it to her, to—

  To prove that he was different now.

  As darkness gathered and the British began another go at bombardment, Rachel made herself face it: to prove that it would be safe to go back to him.

  The thought was nonsensical. She couldn’t go back to him, unless she meant to give up all her plans. A respectable Jewish clerk’s wife couldn’t leave her children—she refused to believe there might not be children—with her husband while she wore men’s clothing and traveled on Saturday and ate treyf food at taverns.

  Besides, Mrs. Mendelson had told the rabbi she’d washed Rachel’s body and buried her. There was no explanation for what had happened but the truth, and the truth would bring shame to the Mendelsons. Rachel refused to see her great accomplishments become Mrs. Mendelson’s dirty linen.

  She was so tired of shame.

  But in the gathering dark, Rachel remembered how Nathan had been the only person besides herself who didn’t lower his voice respectfully in her mother’s sickroom. Mrs. Jacobs had hated those hushed, gentle voices.

  Nathan had acted just as he always did, and Rachel had been so grateful every evening when he came home from the counting house and talked her mother’s ear off for a while, because acting just as she always did with leaden weights on her heart and her hands and the corners of her mouth made Rachel so tired she could barely keep her eyes open.

  And then, after Mrs. Jacobs died, he’d walked home for dinner every single day for weeks and told funny stories about his fellow clerks, talking right over his mother when she interrupted him pointedly, Doesn’t your boss mind you leaving in the middle of the day?

  At the time, Rachel had felt oppressed by his eager pauses after every joke, but…it had been better than being alone. It had been much better than being alone with Mrs. Mendelson.

  He’d gone to say Kaddish for her mother three times a day for eleven months, as if he were her own son, even though Mrs. Mendelson said, Oh, hire a student!

  He hadn’t known what to do, but he’d tried.

  It had been five years since they’d lived together. She’d changed. God knew she’d changed. Why not him?

  She had chafed at all the rules of Jewish life, but the army was full of rules too, some of them equally arcane and purposeless, and they didn’t bother her too much, because she’d chosen them. If she chose to be Nathan’s wife…

  Was that a fresh noise in the continual roar?

  Rachel stood, listening intently. Did the sky seem less dark than it had a moment ago? The crackling sound increased—

  Fire!

  Men were climbing up on the banquettes, gaping at the town. She would have to restore order among her squad in a moment—beside her Scipio shouted, “Keep the line, knuckleheads!”—but first she followed them onto the ledge along the back wall of the trench and stood on her tiptoes to see.

  Her breath caught. Three of the British ships anchored in the river were ablaze, struck by French hotshot. One flamed from its waterline to the top of its mast, a great burning torch lighting up the night.

  Rachel glanced around for the officers; they were dazzled too. A tall lieutenant colonel from another light battalion climbed out of the trench to shout, “We’ve had word her crew is safe. Enjoy the view!”

  A cheer went up, and Rachel huzzahed with them, tears pricking her eyes that kindness was possible in the midst of destruction. Whispers ran up and down the line: That’s John Laurens. Henry Laurens’s son.

  Behind the whoops and whispers, though, she heard another sound: a bloodthirsty murmur of disappointment.

  Destruction always had an element of beauty, didn’t it? Even this brutal war. She’d felt it from the moment the first shot was fired in New York City. They were burning the old world down.

  But lately she’d been wondering more and more what would be left when everything was in ashes. What would be built on the rubble, and who would do the building?

  She remembered what Nathan used to say, when she spoke of the people ruling: Mobs never bode well for Jews. How long before those Liberty Boys who dragged their fellow New Yorkers through the streets and tarred and feathered them for supporting the King remember they don’t like us very much either? What’s going to stop them when they do?

  Everyone here knew Henry Laurens’s name. The former president of the Continental Congress had backed General Washington during that dreadful winter at Valley Forge and fought to get them food and clothes, and every soldier would remember him kindly to the day they died.

  No doubt Washington himself felt the same. When the commander in chief was leading their new nation, his friends would be listened to and his enemies shut out.

  Would she and Nathan be remembered kindly? Would they be remembered at all?

  Any day now, the Allied commanders would judge Yorktown sufficiently starved and battered, and the army would storm the town. Rachel’s eyes turned to the British redoubts, along the line of the truncated second parallel. They’d have to take those first, wouldn’t they, to finish the trench?

  Determination and fear were a bitter taste at the back of her tongue. Not fear of death. It was easy to say, like Queen Esther, And if I perish, I perish. No, her terror was of failure. Of doing nothing of note, of fumbling ingloriously, of being finally found out for a woman before she even got to the battle. Of being forgotten after the war, or worse, remembered with disgust.

  She had staked everything on this new country, on its being better than the old one. She’d never rated the sacrifice very high, but today being Nathan’s wife felt like a large thing to leave behind. A heavy thing, a sacred offering.

  She had to make it worth it.

  She watched the ship burn until there was nothing left. In less than an hour, that tall craft that took skill and love and years to build went down without a trace, and the water closed over it. They all
watched. They all cheered. It was beautiful. Better than fireworks.

  Chapter Six

  October 11

  It was noon. Nathan could hear the drums beating. That meant Rachel’s division would be leaving the trenches.

  Could he go and inquire after her health? Was that giving her room to breathe?

  The British guns had barely fired yesterday—and then in the evening they’d resumed with a vengeance. Nathan had grown up in New York City and was accustomed to sleeping through noise, but Yorktown was putting him to the test.

  But of course, it wasn’t the noise itself that bothered him. With every boom, he wondered, Did it hit her?

  He didn’t understand how she did it, how you got used to walking into bullets and just hoping they’d hit someone else. At least when he went back into Yorktown, he wouldn’t be expected to march in columns. He could duck and dodge and hide behind things.

  The messengers he’d sent to the hospital this morning all said casualties were low, and they hadn’t seen her.

  He was assisting the quartermaster sergeant of Rachel’s division, a friendly Dutchman named Rinckhart, in dividing up peas and rice for rations.

  “Either sit down or go,” Rinckhart said, not unsympathetically.

  Nathan realized he’d been standing up and sitting back down continuously for… “What time is it?”

  “Four past.”

  …For four minutes. He sat down and tried to calculate how many pounds of flour they could spare each mess in the 2nd New Jersey today. Rinckhart had two barrels to last the siege, at one hundred ninety-six pounds of flour each, and one hundred twenty-one men in that regiment out of a total of five hundred forty-two in the division, with six men to a mess.

  He gave up and put his head on the desk. At one o’clock, he told himself. At one o’clock he could go and she would probably be done with all her urgent corporal business and probably she would be asleep in her tent, but at least he’d know she was safe and then he could divide numbers correctly.