That satisfied Jeremiah’s curiosity once and for all. “Since you are who you say you are, I’m back to my friends.” Away he went, never once thinking he ought to wait for a general’s permission. He was an Atlantean, all right.
Hanover looked much the same as it had when Victor left it. More shops stood empty than he would have liked. Forts made the Royal Navy think twice about drawing near enough to bombard the city, but the English warships stifled seagoing commerce. Even salt cod was in short supply, and expensive in specie—far worse in Atlantean paper. And when the coast of English Atlantis ran low on salt cod, the end of the world or something even worse lay around the next corner.
Victor found that Blaise had got into town a day ahead of him. That usually happened when they didn’t travel together. Victor had to be circumspect and careful. Blaise didn’t, as long as he wasn’t in a land where he had to worry about being reenslaved. Not many people paid much attention to a shabby Negro riding along by himself.
“Oh, yes. The redcoats stopped me once,” he said. “I played dumb. They let me go after a while. Some of them tried scrubbing my arm to see if the color came off.” He laughed at their ignorance.
“Now we have to see how we go about smashing Cornwallis between our men and de la Fayette’s,” Victor said.
“That will be good—if we can do it,” Blaise said. “Yes, that will be very fine—if we can bring it off.” His mixture of hope and doubt seemed almost Biblical in its cadences.
Victor was glad he’d found a certain scrap of paper in his pocket. “What we ought to do next,” he said, “is to get some pigeons into de la Fayette’s hands.”
“He has plenty of food for now.” Blaise caught himself, and also caught Victor’s drift. “Oh—you mean the messenger birds.”
“That’s just what I mean,” Victor agreed. “Then we can speak back and forth with him without risking human messengers. The English are also less likely to learn what we say to each other if we use pigeons in place of men.”
“I do like the idea,” Blaise said. “To set words on the wings of the wind . . . We use drums in Africa to pass news from one village to another, but anyone can hear a drum and know what it means. The birds are a better answer.” Then admiration seemed to curdle into anger, for he added, “One more thing you white men thought of that we did not.”
“Well, we’re going to use it against other white men,” Victor said.
Blaise might not even have heard him. “When I saw the ship that would bring me here . . . It was so big, and had all the sails and all the ropes—the rigging—and it was like nothing my folk could have built. And then they chained me in the hold, and now I know what hell and damnation are like.”
Victor had never gone aboard a blackbirder—an innocent-sounding name for a slave ship if ever there was one. But he had been in Cosquer harbor when one tied up there. The stink coming from the slaver was enough to knock a man off his feet even a furlong or two downwind. To cross the ocean in the middle of that stench, in chains, on short rations . . . Victor was glad he’d been born a white man, and an Atlantean.
But Blaise hadn’t finished. “When I came on shore at last, all wobbly and thin and sick, almost the first thing I saw was a horse pulling a man in a two-wheeled carriage. And the first thing that went through my head was, What a good idea! Why didn’t we think of that?”
“Have you horses?” Victor asked.
“No. They sicken and die,” the Negro answered. “White men try to use them in my country now and then, but they never last long.”
“Have you wheeled carriages?”
“For children’s toys. Not for carts and carriages and wagons—and guns. Without horses, without oxen, we have no beasts to pull them.” Blaise grinned crookedly. “And I know your next question. We also have not the proper roads, only tracks for people on foot. So what good would the fine carriage be in Africa? But it was so clever!”
“One of these days, I hope the world will say the same about the United States of Atlantis,” Victor said. “And I hope that what we do in Atlantis will speak even in Africa.”
“Maybe so—if it speaks of freeing slaves instead of buying and selling them,” Blaise said. And the old argument began again.
In days gone by, Avalon’s pirates had pioneered the practice of posting by pigeon. Red Rodney Radcliffe and the other freebooters lost regardless. But the lesson of what they’d done, unlike so many, did not go to waste. Atlantis had been a pigeon fancier’s paradise ever since.
Finding out where de la Fayette and the French were came first. The Atlanteans needed pigeons that homed for some nearby village. They also needed to provide the marquis with birds that would return to Hanover. Once those things were done, the two separated forces could easily and quickly talk back and forth.
All that proved harder than Victor Radcliff had dreamt it would. The English, unfortunately, had understood Atlantean predilections. While they held Hanover, they’d harassed and hunted anyone who raised homing pigeons. They’d taken birds, and they’d killed birds, too. Several breeders passed more time than they’d wanted in close confinement.
“Didn’t anyone keep a flock intact?” Victor cried in dismay—no, in something not far from despair.
One of the pigeon fanciers said, “Wasn’t easy, General. By my hope of heaven, it wasn’t possible—never mind easy. Too many folk loyal to King George in town. Someone who knew you had birds would run to the redcoats, and then it’d be all up with you. Out in the countryside, there are still birds that will home for Hanover. Hardly any left here to the little towns.”
To a Hanover man, any town but his own was a little town. Some Hanover men would likely call London a little town. But that was the least of Victor’s worries. He let out a heartfelt sigh. “Well, not every plan works the way you wish it would when you put it together.”
“Runners, then?” Blaise asked.
“Runners,” Victor agreed, and wished he didn’t have to.
He also wished he would have arranged a code with the Marquis de la Fayette before separating from him. Then they would have had a chance to communicate without letting the English understand what they intended even if Cornwallis’ soldiers captured a messenger. It would have been a good idea had he thought of it sooner. Of course, many things would have been good ideas had one thought of them sooner.
He had to explain the idea of codes to Blaise. Then he had to explain the explanation. Blaise could read and write, but he’d come late to both arts. The vagaries of English spelling still bemused him—when they didn’t enrage him. “You scramble up the words even worse than they are already? Nobody never read them after that,” he said in dismay. Grammar deserted him, but not sincerity.
“We scramble them in a fashion upon which we have agreed in advance,” Victor said. “That way, they easily may be unscrambled once more.”
“Easily? I think not,” Blaise said, and maybe he wasn’t so far wrong.
Victor’s men did everything they could to strengthen the works protecting Hanover’s harbors. He didn’t know where the Royal Navy had gone—into Terranovan waters, to fight the new uprising there? or off into the eastern Atlantic, to find and fight the French fleet?—but he didn’t want ships of the line unexpectedly returning and cannonading the city. He had to be able to give them the warmest reception he could.
In due course, one of his messengers returned with a letter from the Marquis de la Fayette. The fellow also displayed a tricorn with a bullet hole clean through the crown. “Good thing it’s a trifle small, and sits high on my head,” he told Victor. “Otherwise, you’d be a long time waiting for that there paper.”
“Well, Micah, I am glad you came back imperforate,” Victor replied. “Easier to get a new hat than a new messenger any day of the week, and that is a fact.”
“Prices what they are nowadays, though, I reckon you can get yourself a messenger cheaper,” Micah said. “Unless you’ve got specie in your pocket, anyway. A man with specie”—he sigh
ed wistfully—“he can do anything, near enough. Sure ain’t got my hands on any for a long time.”
Victor maintained what he hoped was a prudent silence. The merchants and shopkeepers and taverners of Hanover discounted the Atlantean Assembly’s paper no less steeply than anyone else. If anything, the Assembly’s paper was worth less here than elsewhere in Atlantis. Having lain under English occupation for so long, Hanover was used to the sweet clink of silver and gold. Men with nothing but paper to spend had to spend a lot of it.
“Maybe you could do something about it,” Micah said hopefully. “Shoot people who won’t take paper at face—something like that, anyhow. You’re the general, after all.”
“Maybe.” Victor knew the messenger sadly overestimated his power. The first merchant he shot for not overvaluing the Atlantean Assembly’s paper would hurl all the others headlong into the loyalist camp. If that didn’t lose the Assembly the war, nothing would. You simply could not ask a man to cheat himself, not even in the cause of liberty.
“What does the Frenchie say?” Micah asked, seeing he wouldn’t get Victor to start executing tradesmen.
With a practiced thumb, Victor popped the wax seal off the letter. With his other thumb, just as practiced, he ordered Micah from the room. The messenger muttered as he left, but leave he did. He must have had a pretty good notion that Victor wouldn’t tell him what de la Fayette had written. Still, even if the general commanding hadn’t, he might have. How were you worse off for trying?
The marquis spoke in a straightforward fashion. He wrote a much more flowery French, one that showed off his learning. Victor could make sense of it, which was all that mattered. And, having read through the letter, he found that de la Fayette made good sense, even if the nobleman used twice as many words to make it as he might have.
De la Fayette proposed a joint attack against Cornwallis’ men two weeks hence, the aim being to push the redcoats away from Hanover and up toward Croydon. If the foe can be trapped in Croydon and defeated there, the whole of the coastal region from Hanover north-wards shall be cleansed, he wrote. Should this be accomplished, how shall England continue to maintain that she governs Atlantis? Surely it would be the veriest impossibility.
“Surely,” Victor said aloud. Did that mean England wouldn’t keep trying to maintain it? Could the enemy be pinned in Croydon and . . . cleansed, to use the young Frenchman’s word? Another good question. Victor read the letter again. Slowly, he nodded to himself. “Worth a try.”
He spent a pile of paper and even some precious specie readying the army to move. As he’d thought, the sight of silver spurred Hanover’s merchants and artisans to far greater exertions than did the Atlantean Assembly’s notes. “Pretty soon you’ll need to bring me a wheelbarrowful of paper to get yourself a wheelbarrowful of hardtack,” a prominent baker told Victor.
“Things aren’t so bad as that,” protested Victor, who knew exactly how bad things were—he watched the exchange rate like a red-crested eagle.
“Didn’t saw ‘now.’ Said ‘pretty soon,’ ” the baker replied. “Nowadays, your barrow of paper’ll buy you three barrows of biscuit, easy.” He still stretched things, but by less than Victor wished he would have.
Atlantean cavalry patrols ranged north and south of Hanover. They brought back several men—and one woman—who’d tried to abscond with word for General Cornwallis. One of the men had a better written summary of the Atlantean army’s plans than Victor had prepared for himself. “Where did you come by this?” Victor demanded, wondering if his officers included another budding Biddiscombe.
“Made it up myself,” the captured spy said, not without pride. “Asked around a little here, a little there, put the pieces together, and that there was what I got.”
“You do know what you’ll get now?” Victor asked.
“Reckon I do.” The man shrugged. He was giving a good game show of not showing fear. “Chance you take, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Victor agreed. “You took it, and you lost.”
He watched the spy hanged the next day. The fellow went up the stairs to the top of the gallows under his own power. More than a few men about to die needed help on their last journey. Jeering patriots cursed him as he climbed. His face was pale, but he had the spirit to nod back to them. The hangman tied his legs together, hooded him, and put the rope around his neck. The trap dropped. A snap said the noose broke the spy’s neck. He got a quick death, then, and an easy one, as such things went.
Victor wondered how much that meant, and whether it meant anything. Had the riders caught all the loyalists slipping out of Hanover? Was some other man even now giving an English officer word as detailed as this dead spy would have brought? Or were several others passing on smaller pieces of the puzzle, pieces an intelligent enemy could fit together into a pattern that showed the truth?
It struck the commanding general as only too likely. He’d done what he could do, though. He had to hope it would prove enough.
One way to make it enough would have been to move out sooner than he’d planned and catch the English by surprise. Had he been operating alone, he would have done just that. But he had to take his allies into account. Moving out before the date agreed to with de la Fayette would also have caught the French by surprise. Since the whole point of this scheme was to catch the redcoats between the two armies, he couldn’t afford to strike precipitately.
A fishing smack coming up the coast from Cosquer brought him a letter. As far as he knew, he’d never heard of Monsieur Marcel Freycinet, who inscribed his name on the outside of the letter. Puzzled, Victor broke the seal and unfolded the sheet of paper.
Monsieur Freycinet, it turned out, was grateful to him. As Victor read on, he decided he would much rather not have had the other man’s gratitude. If he did have to have it, he would much rather not have known he had it. Freycinet turned out to be the planter who owned Louise, whose embraces Victor had so enjoyed when he was first making the Marquis de la Fayette’s acquaintance.
And not only had he enjoyed them, it seemed. Louise was with child, and confidently asserted that Victor was the father. Victor could hardly call her a liar. If he hadn’t fathered a child on her, it wasn’t for lack of effort. Here was Blaise’s query, come back to haunt him.
The situation was impossible. It was impossible, in fact, in several different ways. One reason Freycinet was grateful was that the baby, which would of course be a slave like its mother, would provide pure profit for him. Imagining a son of his on the auction block made Victor feel he was bathing in hellfire.
He couldn’t very well claim the baby for his own, though. The mere thought of the scandal made him flinch. And the scandal wasn’t the worst—far from it. How would Meg feel if he did such a thing? He thought of the three young children they’d buried together. If he produced an heir of his flesh, but produced that heir from a comely Negress . . . The humiliation wouldn’t kill his wife, but it would kill everything the two of them had together.
When Louise opened her legs for him, he’d never dreamt there might be issue from their joining. He wondered why not. He didn’t wonder long: he’d cared about his own pleasure, his own satiation, and very little else. But a woman who lay down with a man could get up with child. It happened all the time. If it didn’t, there would be no more men and women.
It happened all the time, yes. Why did it have to happen this time in particular? In spite of everything, Victor laughed at himself. How many men had said that before him? Any man who’d ever had it happen when he lay down with a woman not his wife—and that was just for starters.
What was he going to do? “What am I going to do?” he asked out loud. No answer came to him from the empty air. The only folk who found answers there were prophets and madmen. If he was going to come up with any answers, he’d have to find them inside himself.
He couldn’t even go talk with Monsieur Freycinet and see if they could hash out something. No, he’d have to do it by letter. Travel back and forth would
make the conversation long and slow. And, if Freycinet proved no gentleman, he could publish Victor’s letters to the world. That would embarrass not only Victor personally but also the Atlantean cause.
Well, no help for it. Even more reluctantly than if he were visiting a dentist, Victor inked a pen. He did the best he could, offering to buy Louise and set her free in whichever northern state she preferred. After a little more thought, he added in the price the child—his child!—would likely bring. He could afford it. He thought he could, anyhow. Meg would surely notice the hole this price made in their accounts . . . but what could you do? He’d worry about that when it happened. This had already happened.
He’d never sealed a letter with such care. The last thing he wanted was for anyone, even Blaise, to find out about this. The sealed sheet headed south aboard the first ship bound from Hanover to Cosquer.
Long before Victor could hope for a response—long before that ship could possibly have got to Cosquer—he had to lead the Atlantean army out against the redcoats. The chance of dying in battle had never looked so attractive before.
Redwood Hill remained in Atlantean hands. Victor took the Atlanteans out into open country just south of it, then swung northwest toward the closest English positions. After the first couple of days in the field, thoughts of Louise—and of Marcel Freycinet—didn’t fill his every waking moment. He had other things to worry about.
Messengers from the Marquis de la Fayette told him the French regulars were moving, too. Maybe Cornwallis captured some of the marquis’ messengers. Maybe his loyalist auxiliaries kept him well informed about what his opponents were up to. Or maybe he simply had a good sense of what he would have done were he commanding them. He maneuvered skillfully, doing everything he could to keep them from joining forces.
The United States of Atlantis Page 33
