by Jack Fernley
Mercer moved closer to Washington. He placed his hand on the general’s shoulder, a degree of intimacy that no others in the room could share, an intimacy born almost twenty years earlier when they had both served the British at the siege of Fort Duquesne. In almost a whisper, certainly in a pitch none but the general could hear, Mercer said:
‘George, Nathanael is correct. And there is your own personal reputation to consider. You know there are, even within this room and our closed ranks, those who argue that you have failed to lead this war competently. Do not give them an excuse to seed further discord. For they will seize such an opportunity and we will all be damned. A house divided falls. Do not be the architect of your own division. By all means we should punish the man, but do not make him a martyr to provide excuses for others to desert our cause.’
With that he pulled back to stand with the ranks of the other generals, and then said loudly:
‘We have need to dispatch a proper person over the river to make the necessary enquiries of Trenton and its surrounds. What guards are posted upon the different roads leading into the town, the number on the mill bridge, where the enemy’s cannon lay and their number. Indeed, to ascertain the number of enemy forces in Trenton, whether reinforcements have latterly arrived or indeed marched out of the town, where they lay and the general defences that have been established. This and other intelligence we have failed to procure in the necessary detail. Despite the efforts of those brave souls who have perished attempting to do so.
‘For that, knowledge of the town would improve our chances of good fortune and Hand here has knowledge of the town. Did you not practise in Trenton before joining the cause?’
‘I did, sir. I practised as a surgeon in the town for a period of time. Myself and O’Leary continued to live there until my family were . . .’ His words trailed off. The memory of Catherine, barely a year earlier, her face so radiant, a wide-open smile, kneeling before him, telling him she was carrying their child.
Mercer, embarrassed on Hand’s behalf, continued: ‘I would respectfully suggest that, as a consequence of his unfathomable actions of the night last, Hand be stripped of his rank of lieutenant colonel, and be sent to scout the town and its surrounds. The knowledge he returns with can be used to ascertain whether the policy you so recently brought to this table should be acted upon. There is, of course, not an insignificant amount of risk attached to such an assignment.’
Washington stared at the man, not unsympathetic to his pain. But there was only one thought occupying his mind: could he be seen to back down?
As he thought, Henry Knox spoke up: ‘Sir, a man from Jersey came into our camp this past hour. He crossed at Howells Ferry further up river. Our man’s news was that Rall this morning had a local farmer shot, accused of spying. A fresh attachment of Hessians appear to have arrived in the past few days, straight from Europe. My man believes the Redcoats have heard wagons going all night and may have notice of the boats that we have brought down to McKonkey’s. They appear to have information, sir, information regarding our every movement. We have little time before us. If we hesitate for too long, we may be surprised in our camp. Once the ice is formed across the Delaware, Howe will move those Hessian troops, invade Pennsylvania and aim to take Philadelphia. We may not be able to stop him.
‘We must guard against his designs, but how are we to do that? Sir, we must strike and strike fast. On the question of Hand, I agree with you. He has behaved as a fool and should rightly be punished as such. But in war, pragmatism is always the best card a player can be dealt. If our spies are correct – that the town holds significant numbers of Hessian troops, yet remains unfortified – now may be the time for us to launch a surprise attack. But we require the highest quality of evidence. Just as we cannot afford not to make a significant breakthrough at this juncture, equally we can’t afford another disaster. If we send Hand on this mission this evening, we will know by this time tomorrow how likely either scenario is. I would agree with these gentlemen: commute the sentence and send Hand on a journey that may be equal in peril, but far more satisfactory to our ends.’
‘Thank you, General Knox, thank you all. But you are all northerners. I need to understand how this plays with our men from the south.’ Washington fixed his eye on the only commander yet to express an opinion. ‘In the absence of General Lee, I am indebted to you, General Gates, for your thoughts on this matter. How would this play with your Virginians?’
Gates, the English army veteran who had established a plantation in Virginia only a few years earlier, at first maintained his silence. He felt little loyalty to his Virginian troops, in his eyes little more than a godless rabble, incapable of discipline, but he felt even less loyalty to Washington, whose prowess in recent months he had openly started to mock. It was evident to any halfwit that a far more competent general to lead the army in the field was available. He, Horatio Gates, could win this war, could have won this war in a matter of months, but no, he had to play second fiddle to this amateur. Any opportunity to undermine Washington’s leadership was too good to pass on.
‘I am not surprised by General Knox’s interpretation. This camp – as I have often insisted – is riven with Howe’s spies. We continue to create our own misfortune. The men of Virginia will do what I as their commander command them to do. I have little faith in these plans for this proposed attack on Trenton. To my mind, as I have said, it is folly. We should retire at once for the winter to Philly and plan for the spring. By all means send your Hand to Trenton. I would hope that he comes back with certain intelligence that would disabuse you of an attack.’
Washington refused to follow the bait, and simply turned to Hand, and said: ‘You have made an unlikely escape from an early grave.’
SIX
The snow had been falling for several hours. The night was bitterly cold and dark, every misstep and fumble reminding Hand and O’Leary how ill-suited their clothes were to this weather. They had crossed the Delaware by boat, rowed by Old Tom who kept the ferry, his face furrowed and turned to leather by fifty-odd years of winter and summer crossings. From there they had made it on foot across farmland, stumbling over frozen, rutted fields, making the most of a weak moonlight and their shared memories of the lay of the land. They walked with their muskets ready, for at every step they expected a British scout.
‘This is a grand adventure you’ve got me into, fella, I don’t think. I should be under cover, dreaming of girls from County Kerry, not freezing my arse off out here. For Christ’s sake!’ He had stumbled over a frozen cart rut, almost falling to his knees.
‘Keep it down, Pat, you’ll have them on top of us before we know it. I’m not going to apologise any more. Besides which, you don’t mean it. You would have done the same for me. Did you get Cromwell out of the camp?’
‘Yes, Sarah took care of that as soon as we saw those Virginians running off to tell their bosses. He should be safely in Philly by now. Lucky sod. Wish I were.’
They spoke no more after that. Moving quietly, their senses attuned to every foreign sound in the muddled darkness. On the edge of a copse they saw it: no more than a silvery flash in the early dawn light, something that might have been nothing, but something that could have been the faint movement of a well-polished inch or so of steel, something to signify immense danger.
They halted.
Slowly they started again and almost immediately stopped. In the dull light, Hand brought his right hand to his temple and discreetly pointed left. O’Leary faintly nodded. And then, suddenly, they were off at speed. Ahead of them a bush erupted in frenzy and there was their game: a man, a soldier, a scout now being scouted.
The chase was on, across bramble and thorn, to the edge of the woods, over extended, gnarled, grasping roots and under low-hanging, fingering branches. The two Irishmen, in a pincer move, gaining on the man heading through the woods and back down towards the river.
O’Leary was closer and he took the decision to bring the man to ground. Throwing h
imself over a thorn bush, he flew through the air at the man’s midriff. The two fell heavily to the ground. But O’Leary had no grip on the man, who fought to free himself cleanly, kicking the other in the forehead. A powerful kick. A well-heeled boot.
Hand ran closer to them, the opponent now free of O’Leary and on his feet once more, finding his way along a little-travelled path, but a path, nevertheless, that brought him quickly to the end of the woods, and running along the edge of the buffs. He was running north, towards the town. He had to be stopped.
Hand was just a few inches from the man. He would have felt the hot breath of the Irishman on his neck before he felt the heavy weight of his body, knocking his legs from him. They stumbled to the ground together. The pursued, screaming out at the top of his voice in an accent Hand could not decipher, but took to be German, scrambled to his feet, disorientated.
Hand also got to his feet and saw in the breaking light that in his disorientation, the man was teetering on the very edge of the bluff, at its highest point above the river. Without knowing where he was, the man turned and stepped out on to the blank canvas of the drop. Hand moved quickly and with no little luck, was able to grab the collar of the man’s jacket. But the force of the man’s fall pulled Hand to the ground and he lay on the edge of the rock face, his right arm over the precipice holding on to the collar, the man dangling above the icy waters of the Delaware.
There was something odd about this jacket. It was neither a Redcoat nor the blue coat of the Hessian, let alone the calico smock of a scout. A grey-green jacket, shorter than the usual military cut, with pockets on the buttoned tunic. The man was struggling, which made Hand’s hold almost impossible, even as he added his left hand to the jacket collar.
‘Stop your kicking and struggling, otherwise I won’t be able to hold you! Stop it, damn it!’
He looked down at the man, whose eyes burned fiercely. There seemed a dark hatred to the man, a harsh defiance. And then, most extraordinary, he started to hit out at Hand’s arms, as if he wanted to fall.
There was a tear in the fabric of the jacket, so Hand had a clear view of the man’s neck. There was an odd tattoo across it. Numbers, as if a code. And then the jacket tore apart. And the man fell silently to his death, crushed by the rocks below on the bank of the river.
Hand pulled himself to his knees, still clutching the remnants of the grey-green torn collar. O’Leary was next to him now.
‘What happened, Ed?’
‘He kinda . . . he kinda refused my help, like he threw himself down. He didn’t want me to pull him up.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The collar of his jacket.’
‘No, what’s that silver thing on the collar? I’ve never seen that on a Hessian before.’
Hand looked at the cloth in his hand. He had never seen the marks before, different to anything he had seen on a British soldier or a Hessian mercenary. A silver cross of sorts, four arms, each bent at ninety degrees.
SEVEN
Dawn had given way to a frosty, but clear morning. After the incident on the bluffs Hand and O’Leary had moved quickly, skirting the edge of the River Road to Trenton, wary of running into any other Hessians. Reaching the edge of the town, they heard the typical sounds of a camp rising, men coughing, pissing, murmuring, complaining. Hand turned to O’Leary.
‘There’s a couple of sentries to the left over there. If we make a quick run for the wall to the right, that’ll get us to Helen O’Flannery’s. Fancy some eggs and coffee for your breakfast?’
O’Leary nodded. Of course, he knew what also lay to the left – the town cemetery, where Hand’s Catherine and their child lay. He noted that his old friend could not bear to look towards the picket fence of the graveyard. So they moved off to O’Flannery’s cottage.
Helen O’Flannery, a Limerick girl by birth, had come to America twenty years before with her new husband, Seamus. Settling in Trenton, they had set up a grocery and hardware store, and raised a family of eight girls, the last three of which Hand had brought into the world. Seamus had died a few years earlier, one of the victims of the 1770 cholera epidemic, along with three of the girls. Tough, rough and a bitter enemy of the British, Helen supplied food and drink to both sides of the conflict, ‘But there’s never a pound of apples I’ve sold to the Brits that I haven’t pissed on beforehand.’
‘Doctor Hand and that wastrel Patrick O’Leary, now what could bring you here this morning at such an early hour, your clothes all wet and dirty?’ she asked, a twinkle in her eye, as she opened her parlour door, a broad fire already burning.
Walking in, the immediate warmth of the room a more than welcome respite, Hand replied: ‘And I might ask what would you be doing up at such an hour with this fire already so well established, Helen O’Flannery?’
‘You’ve a lot of questions for a man who I would wager is looking for some eggs, bacon and coffee, Edward Hand. Many more of those and I’ll send you back out of the yard and into the warm embrace of those Prussian soldiers who look so pretty in their blue coats and breeches, unlike scruffy monkeys like youse.’
‘I wouldn’t mind getting meself one of those coats, Helen, you know, to keep the cold out.’
‘Yes, and it’ll be typical of a stupid lad like yerself that you’d pick one up and then get shot by a Yankee soldier looking for an easy mark, Patrick.’
‘You know the boy too well, Helen.’
‘Aach, if it kept me bloody warm, I’d run the risk of getting shot in it. We’re supposed to be an army, but we’ve no uniforms. Some of the lads are barely shod. The British know how to look after their boys, so they do,’ said O’Leary.
‘They have to, otherwise they’ll bugger off back to Germany. That’s the price we pay for being a free army of lads, Pat,’ Hand said, taking his place at the table.
‘From what I hear, there’ll be no lads left come this New Year’s,’ said Helen, stoking the fire. ‘Out of New Jersey and hanging by a thread in Pennsylvania, what the hell are youse playing at? You had the bloody Brits on the run; now all the talk is of begging for forgiveness and Washington being taken off to London in chains. Marie, get your arse out of bed and get some eggs scrambling for our gentlemen callers, and some bacon frying while you’re at it.’
‘You wouldn’t be having some chops would yer, Helen? I’d die for a chop.’
‘If you want, you can have porridge and damn the bacon, Pat O’Leary. Chops? Who’d you think yer are? King George and Lord North come a-visiting?’
Marie, thirteen years of age, entered the kitchen, mock bowed with a ‘Doctor Hand, Mister O’Leary, pleased to see you both’ and immediately started to work the food.
O’Leary joined Hand at the table, while O’Flannery began to pour three cups of warm black coffee.
Hand took his and said, ‘Thank you, Helen. Good to be seeing you. Been a long few months.’
‘Aye, all the best men in Trenton are camped with yours on the other side of the river. Just some of the Tories left here. The girls around these parts getting mighty itchy though; those Germans are a very handsome band, believe me.’ She paused. ‘I’ve had the girls keep an eye on Catherine’s grave. You’ll find it as sweetly manicured as it could hope to be.’
Hand looked away, his eyes scattering around the room.
‘Thank you, thank you all.’ Then an urge to find something else to discuss. ‘So, tell me, how many are there?’
‘The Germans?’
Hand nodded.
‘They bring in fresh troops regular. Last group came in, what, three days ago. Smaller group, maybe two hundred or more, led by a proper general an’ all, von Steuben they call him; right bastard, I’d say. Seem a different bunch to the rest. Most of them are the kind, as you say, mercenaries, been around, fight for anyone, would fight for the damn Indians if they had money to give ’em. This lot. This lot are different. They are what you’d call disciplined. Proper discipline. They shave, their hair is short and well kept, their uniforms ironed and
different to the others. And such uniforms, like none you’ve seen before.’
‘Grey-green, short, buttoned up?’
‘That’ll be them. They have some very nice boots as well. You’d be snug with their boots, believe me. Proper cowhide, them. If I didn’t know better, I’d be thinking the British have paid these to come and finish the job off. And they look like they could, believe me.’
‘Where are they settled in?’
‘Well, they’re with most of the troops, camped out back of Morgan’s field. Their general, this von Steuben, he’s not like Rall, the fella in charge. He’s a lazy arse, make no mistake. Living it up in Pott’s house on King Street like King George himself. Nothing he likes more than entertaining himself with some of the finer ladies of Trenton, as it were. To bed late, up late. I ain’t got none of your military training – look at me, I’m just a poor grocer from Limerick with no sense whatsoever – but even I might be a-thinking: the Continental Army – what’s left of it – is parked outside across the river. I’d be looking to make some fortifications. Not him though.’
‘We passed through their lines with barely a muster.’
‘Aside from one fella who must be with this von Steuben. The same uniform and a silver mark I’ve never seen before,’ added O’Leary.
‘Like a spider’s legs?’
‘Like a spider’s legs, yes.’
‘They’re fond of that one, make no mistake. They march behind a banner with it, black and red, quite fetching it is too. You can see for yourself this morning.’
‘This morning?’
‘Aye, there’s going to be some kind of parade in the town this morning. A presentation of the new troops to Rall. If he can get out of bed in time.’
‘How many troops you reckon in the town then?’
