Part 2

Sally Rose sighed. “I know,” she said. “Wars are hard on a girl, Kit. I know I’m supposed to hate the British, but how can I, when they are so handsome--when they have such gallant manners! I’ll bet wars don’t mean a thing to those cupids round the mirror. Love doesn’t know Whig from Tory. But why does he have to be--”

Three sharp taps sounded on the other side of the bedroom wall.

“Granny’s cane!” cried Kit softly, lowering her voice to a whisper. “That means we’re keeping her awake. But there’s so much I want to hear. How you met this Gerry, and--”

“Hush!” breathed Sally Rose, remembering Granny’s outbursts of short-lived peppery wrath. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

They slipped into bed and lay quiet, side by side, arms relaxed on the counterpane, watching the moonlight along the wall. First Kitty turned over and sighed. A few minutes later Sally Rose did the same. Finally Kitty sat up and punched her pillow. “I can’t sleep,” she said.

“Neither can I,” said Sally Rose. “I feel as if something were going to happen.”

Below them in the town the church bells began to ring.

They rang and rang, and kept on ringing. Kitty could see them in her mind, tossing wildly in their belfry, high over Market Square. She sat up higher in bed. Sally Rose sat up, too, and reached out for her cousin’s hand.

“It must be a house afire,” said Kitty. “Can’t be a ship in trouble. The wind isn’t that strong.”

She jumped out of bed and ran to the window, but no hot glare lit the sky, only the cold pale light of the April moon. Now a noise of shouting broke out in Fish Street, growing louder every minute. Lights flickered behind the windowpanes of the small wooden houses all about, and went on burning, steady and strong. Shadows moved across them. People were getting up.

Kitty turned from the window. “Let’s get dressed!” she cried. “Maybe Granny will let us go and see what it’s all about.” But Sally Rose was already fastening her petticoat.

Pulling large winter shawls about them to hide half-buttoned bodices and yawning plackets, they tiptoed into the hall, but Granny had got there ahead of them. She stood at the top of the stairs, small, and neat, and wizened, looking as if she were ready to go to church on a Sunday morning, her costume complete, even to gold eardrops and a chip bonnet with ostrich plumes. She had a lighted candle in one hand, and her cane, which she carried but seldom used, in the other. She opened her mouth to speak to them, but was interrupted by a heavy knocking on the front door and a man’s voice shouting for Timothy.

Timothy Coffin, Granny’s hired man who tended the garden and split the firewood, came tumbling down from his tiny attic chamber. Gnarled and weathered, not much younger than his employer, his arms were half in, half out of his woolen jacket, and he carried an old flintlock, like himself, a veteran of the siege of Louisburg thirty years ago.

“Git out o’ my way, women,” he shouted, as he tore past them. “I’ll bet it’s them varmints. I knowed they was about to strike!”

Granny peered after him in bewilderment, as he fumbled with the lock of the heavy front door.

“Does he mean the Indians?” she asked. “When I was a girl I used to hear stories--but it seems they’re too scarce hereabout to cause any trouble now.”

Timothy finally got the door open and stood there, listening to a hoarse excited voice that spoke in the dark outside. Suddenly he turned around.

“I’m off, Ma’am Greenleaf!” he called to Granny. “Them British dogs has struck at last. I signed the pledge for a Minuteman. I swore to hold myself in readiness to march whenever I be ordered. An’ I be ordered now.”

“If you’re going far, you’d better take some food with you,” said Granny smartly. “Take all the bread in the cupboard, and the cold chicken--”

“And the plum cake,” interrupted Kitty. “We cut a plum cake yesterday.”

“Where are you going, Timothy? Where did the ‘British dogs’ strike?” asked Sally Rose, her eyes looking large in her white face.

Timothy did not answer her. Instead he ducked into the kitchen. The front door yawned open, and through it they could hear the terrible clamor of the bells, the lift of excited voices as the townspeople hastened by.

“Come, girls,” said Granny. “I aim to learn what this commotion is all about.”

They followed her out of the house and along High Street, past the Frog Pond and the new training green laid out where the windmill used to be.

A crowd had gathered in front of the Wolfe Tavern, and they paused at the outskirts of it. Torches flared all about, lighting up the portrait of General Wolfe that hung on a pole near the tavern door, flickering on the windowpanes along Fish Street and on the startled faces of the Newburyport folk. Fashionable flounced ladies stood side by side with barefooted fishwives from Flatiron Point, while toddlers clung to their skirts, and urchins raced here and there, shouting with shrill voices, as if they played some sort of exciting game. Most of the men were gathered round the tavern’s high front steps, and new arrivals kept elbowing their way forward every minute. The throng bristled everywhere with gun barrels; a flintlock, a fowling piece, an old queen’s arm.

“There’s Johnny,” said Sally Rose suddenly, and sure enough, Kitty craned her neck and saw him standing with the other men, his hands gripping a heavy musket. He was watching the tavern door intently. He did not look their way.

“What’s going on here?” demanded Granny in a querulous tone. Everybody seemed to be talking at once, but nobody answered her.

A man wearing a blue coat and carrying a sword came out of the tavern and stood still at the top of the steps, looking round him. He held up his hand. The urchins stopped shouting. The bells down the street pealed a time or two and then were silent. The voices of the crowd died away. A sudden burst of spring wind lifted a heap of dead leaves from the gutter and swirled it high in the face of the round white moon.

The man on the steps began to speak. “Men o’ the Port,” he called out, in a voice that was low and deep, a voice that without lifting or straining itself could be heard in all the streets and lanes nearby, “New England blood’s been spilt, as some o’ you know. But for them that don’t, I’ll read the word the postrider brought.” He waved a paper aloft, then held it square in front of him.

“‘To all friends of American Liberty, let it be known! This morning before break of day, a brigade consisting of some twelve hundred redcoats ... marched to Lexington ... and on to Concord Bridge. Many were slain both sides, and the roads are bloody. Another brigade is now upon the march from Boston!’”

He put the paper down. “Men o’ the Port, such as signed the pledge, ‘We do enlist ourselves as Minutemen and do engage that we will hold ourselves in readiness to march!’ All such men to the training green! Fall in by companies! Come, lads! Up the hill!”

With a cheer the men surged up Fish Street, shoulders hunched and heads thrust forward, their guns gripped in their hands. With cries of dismay and alarm the women began to trail after them. Granny stood still, leaning on her cane.

“There’s Dick and Eben,” cried Kitty. “Dick!” She lifted her voice. “Dick, come here and tell me where they are going. Dick, are you going too?”

But Dick and Eben were hurrying after the Minutemen. They looked at the girls and waved, and then ran on.

“Ah, here’s Mr. Cary,” Granny exclaimed. “Now we’ll see what all this uproar is likely to lead to.” She trotted over to the minister who was moving swiftly up the street, his wig not quite straight, and the linen bands at his throat somewhat disordered. “Mr. Cary, tell me now, what does all this mean?”

The minister paused, adjusted his wig, and mopped his brow with a lawn handkerchief. “I’m afraid it means war, Madame Greenleaf. It was bound to come. They’ve oppressed us too far. But about this latest outrage--I myself talked with the postrider, and he was there and saw it all. A frightful slaughter!” He looked at the girls and lowered his voice, but they heard him all the same.

“He says that when he left, the whole rout was fleeing back towards Boston, but he heard Captain Parker say that if they mean to have a war, let it begin here. ’Twould seem they so mean, and that it has begun.”

“Who were the redcoats?” asked Sally Rose in a small tremulous voice. “Did he say if it was the Twenty-third?”

Mr. Cary looked at her sharply. “Who knows one redcoat from another, and what does it matter?” he demanded. “But I believe he did mention the Twenty-third. It seems they were not in the thickest of the engagement, but posted out to help their fellow scoundrels home to Boston.”

Sally Rose let her breath escape in a little sigh of relief. Granny tapped her cane on a granite horse block nearby to get Mr. Carey’s attention again.

“Well, what do our lads think to do about it? Why get folks out of bed in the middle of the night? Must we fortify the Port and barricade ourselves in our houses because there’s been a fuss in Lexington? Are the British headed for Frog Pond Green?”

Mr. Cary started to smile and then bit his lip. “Hardly that, but our companies will assemble and march from there. The word’s been passed for such men as are able to bear arms to make their way to Cambridge with all speed.”

“Huh!” said Granny. “Cambridge is a good ways off. I hope Timothy took the plum cake. Come, girls! Now that I’ve satisfied my mind, I’m going home.”

“Oh no, Gran,” pleaded Sally Rose, composed and sure of herself again, now that she felt reasonably certain her British Gerry had come to no harm. “I want to go up to the green and see them off. It’ll hearten them to have us there, to have us wave them good luck as they march away.”

“Nonsense!” snapped Granny. “The lads will have other things on their minds. They got no time now for yellow hair.”

The squeal of a fife and the solemn throb of a beating drum broke through the shouts of the crowd on the training green.

“But I don’t want to go back to bed,” pouted Sally Rose.

“And why did you think you were going back to bed, miss?” Granny demanded. “Parson Cary says there’s a war begun. That means we’ll into the attic and try to find those bullet molds I put away when I hoped we wouldn’t need them any more. They haven’t been used since your grandfather’s time, but I think likely they’re still there.”

_Chapter Three_

TWO TO BEGIN

“I told you they’d fight,” said the young man grimly, biting the end of a cartridge and letting a thin stream of black powder dribble into the pan of his flintlock. He knelt at the tail gate of the farm wagon that rattled and swayed from side to side as Sergeant Higgs of the Twenty-third drove it pell-mell down the Charlestown Road.

His hat was gone and his red coat in tatters. His white breeches were stained with gunpowder and the blood of the wounded men who lay on the floor of the wagon; stained, too, with the gray earth of this unfamiliar country, so unlike the ruddy loam of his native Devonshire.

“I told you they’d fight,” he repeated. “I been amongst ’em, and I know.”

Nobody answered him, but he heard the roar of musket fire back in the hills, the roar of flames from a burning house in a grove of crooked trees a few yards away. He thought impatiently that it had never taken him so long to load before.

“Shut your pan. Charge with your cartridge. Draw your hammer,” he muttered, as his fingers moved swiftly along the reeking barrel. No old hand at this business of soldiering, he felt reassured to find the phrases of the British Arms Manual fall so readily from his tongue.

The cart rocked and rumbled down a narrow track at the edge of the salt marshes. Moors, clay pits, and scrubby oak trees stretched to the foot of the hillside on his left. To his right, in the middle of the river, he could see the lights on board the man-o’-war _Somerset_, and beyond them, the low roofs and steeples of Boston. Would he ever present arms on Boston Common again, or offer his own arms in another sort of way to the pretty girls who went walking there? He began to doubt it now.

“Run down your cartridge. Withdraw your rammer.” He was ready at last. He lifted the gun and pointed it horizontally, pointed it, pulled the ten-pound trigger, and at the same instant stiffened his body against the powerful recoil.

Then he heard a triumphant roar as the gun went off, sending its charge of powder and ball in the direction of the pursuing Yankees. Hooray! Sometimes it merely sparked and fizzled in the pan. God send he had hit somebody!

“The Yankees don’t fire like that, lad,” he heard a voice mutter.

Turning his head in surprise, he looked down at a battered veteran who crouched a few feet away, dabbing at a shoulder wound.

“What do you mean?” he demanded. There wasn’t enough of the man’s uniform left to tell whether he was an officer or not. Best be safe and address him so. His voice had a ring of authority, for all it came so weakly from his throat.

“I know.” The older man smiled through bluish lips. “You fire as you were taught, and so do I. Did you ever engage with the Rebels before?”

“Not exactly, sir,” said Gerry Malory of the Twenty-third. “I’ve gone amongst them somewhat--‘incognito,’ one might say.”

“Ah! Detailed for spy duty, perhaps?”

Gerry felt his face flush. I talk too much, he thought.

The dusk was drawing in thickly now, with a little fog winding up from the river. Flashes of light burst out on the road behind him, like fireflies in a hawthorn thicket, all the way back towards Cambridge where the relief regiments under Lord Percy were trying to cover the rout of the troops that had charged so proudly that morning on Lexington Green.

He heard a whoosh in the dull air behind them. “Duck, lads,” he cried, and flung himself down on the floor of the cart. The whoosh turned to a shrill whistle and then to a scream as it passed overhead. Then came a thud and a splash as the heavy ball fell harmlessly on the sludgy ground.

Gerry lifted his head. “Drive like the devil, Sergeant,” he shouted. “Once we get over Charlestown Neck, we’re as safe as the Tower of London. They’ll never follow us under the guns of our own ships.”

“Causeway’s just ahead!” shouted back Sergeant Higgs, whipping the horses.

Gerry stood up and looked around him. They were well down on the narrow neck of wasteland now, between the wide, sea-flowing mouths of the Charles and the Mystic. He could smell the salt air and feel the cool wind on his hot face. Groups of weary red-coated men straggled into the marsh grass to let them drive through. How many had preceded him into safety, how many were left in the running fight behind, he couldn’t tell. But he saw campfires on the smooth green hills above Charlestown village, and he thought longingly of the farms and orchards there, a little more longingly of the Bay and Beagle Tavern and a girl called Sally Rose.

“Not detailed for spy duty?” asked the veteran persistently.

Gerry looked down at him, and he was enough of a soldier to realize that the wounded man wanted to engage in conversation in order to forget his pain. He seated himself on the floor of the wagon and answered evasively.

“No, but I go about sometimes. I like to know what kind of men the Rebels are, and what their country is like. Maybe walk out with a girl and play a prank or two. I be West Country-bred, and not too fond o’ towns and barracks life.” Then he thought of a way to shift the attention to another matter. “But what were you saying about the way I shoot?”

The man grinned. A bit of color had come back into his face now, and the dark stain was no longer spreading on the shoulder of his coat.

“Why, you load and prime your piece and blast away, hoping the shot will tell. The Yankees sight and aim. I saw the man who hit me. Stood up behind a stone wall, looked me over, head to toe, and marked me down. We fire line to line, and they fire man to man. We shoot in the direction of the enemy. They pick a target. That’s why they’ve got us running away.”

You mean they shoot like poachers, thought Gerry. Like poachers after pheasants in the squire’s bit o’ woodland. But he did not say it out loud. Every man’s past was his own, but to keep it so, he had to be wary.

They had crossed the Neck by this time, and the road veered away to the right, circling the foot of Bunker Hill and heading for Charlestown village.

“Don’t hear them firing after us any more,” said Gerry, peering back the way they had come. Some of the sunset red was still left in the sky, and enough daylight for him to see that the road behind them was choked with carts and stragglers, but the whole pace of the retreat seemed to have slowed.

“No, and you won’t hear them again tonight. They won’t dare follow us into Charlestown. Could you hold me up, lad? I do not breathe as easily as I am wont to do.”

Gerry knelt down, got his hands under the limp elbows of the fallen officer, and hoisted him into a sitting position against the side of the cart. The man drew a few painful breaths and then spoke again.

“Thank you for your trouble. I am Captain Blakeslee of the King’s Own.”

“’Twas no trouble, sir,” muttered Gerry uneasily. “I be Private Malory of the Twenty-third.”

The captain’s face relaxed in a smile. “A fine regiment--the Welsh Fusileers. I was a guest when they made merry on last St. David’s day. Ah--it comes to me now. I knew I had seen your face before. Were you not the lad who led forth the goat with the gilded horns? He ran wild, I remember, leaped on the table, and up-ended our wine glasses just as we were going to drink to the Prince of Wales! A ludicrous scene!”

Gerry’s cheeks grew hot in the darkness, and he clenched his fists to keep his shame and resentment down. Yes, he had led the damn goat that according to army tradition preceded the Welsh Fusileers whenever they passed in review. Led, and cleaned it, and curried it, and bedded it down every night in a stable near Long Wharf, and twisted garlands about its horns on parade days. He still remembered the hideous embarrassment of the moment when the beast had escaped him.

Signed up for a soldier, he had, reluctantly, but expecting his share of excitement and glory. Until today he had done nothing save tend that black-tempered goat. No wonder he had fallen into the habit of “borrowing” a captain’s uniform or an American’s homespun breeches and tow shirt, and gone swaggering out amongst the girls in the Yankee villages now and then! A man had to have his pride and sweetness and a bit of sport in life. He had learned to imitate the officers’ pompous speech and attitudes, or to talk with a New England twang. Maybe he’d go for a strolling player when he got home again. Maybe he’d be good at it, he thought. But of course, it was in his blood, and no wonder if he should turn out that way.

The farm cart ground to a stop just as Gerry was about to mutter that it was indeed he who led the goat. Sergeant Higgs leaned over to confer with an officer in fresh white trousers and trim jacket, a man who had obviously taken no part in the fighting that day. Then the officer stood aside, the sergeant pulled sharply on the reins, and Gerry felt the wagon leave the road and go lurching across a field at the foot of Bunker Hill. One of the wounded men sat up. The others began to moan and swear.

“You’re off course, Higgs!” shouted Gerry, forgetting that his barracks-mate outranked him and was entitled to a more respectful salute.

Higgs turned around, his broad face a white blur in the darkness. “I be following orders, Private Malory. We’re to wait by yon hill till the troops clears a way through the town so the boats can take us off. By midnight we’ll all be back in Boston.”

“Thank God,” murmured Captain Blakeslee, and then as Higgs drew up the cart in a little grove of locust trees, he turned to the younger man. “Will you help me down on the grass for a bit, lad? I’ve taken a notion to feel the earth under me. Better under than over.” He gave a weak smile.

“Give us a hand, Higgs,” called Gerry, trying to lift the captain, almost a dead weight this time.

Jack Higgs was six years older than Gerry. This was not his first battle, nor the first wounded man he had seen. The moment he joined them in the bed of the wagon, he thrust his hand inside the tattered coat. Then he pulled it out again and muttered under his breath. For a long moment he stared at Gerry.

“Is--is it bad?” faltered the young private, feeling suddenly afraid, as he had not felt all that afternoon when the Yankees were shooting at him as he retreated down the Charlestown Road.

Captain Blakeslee gave a hoarse cough.

“Bad enough,” said Higgs. “Tell you what, Gerry. Go down into Charlestown and see if you can find a surgeon. Tell him we got need of him here.”

“Put--me--on the ground,” whispered Captain Blakeslee. He lay slumped against the side of the wagon and tried to lift his head, but he was not strong enough.

Together Gerry and Sergeant Higgs got him out of the cart and stretched the limp body on the young grass under a locust tree.

“I’ll go quickly,” Gerry promised. “I’ll come back with the surgeon. I hope ’twill be in time.”

“Good luck to you, lad,” said the sergeant. He was still bending over the wounded man when Gerry hastened off.

The journey proved not to be a long one, but over all too soon. Ten minutes hard running across the fields, a brief encounter, and he came pounding back. Jack Higgs stood leaning against the wagon. He had lighted a little fire of dead boughs, and in its light his usually pleasant face looked somber, his eyes a little sick. He was in his shirt sleeves now.

“They told me I was a fool,” panted Gerry. “Told me no surgeon would come out this far to save one man, or three, or four, when so many lies bleeding there in the town. How is the Captain? Jack--where is your coat?”

Sergeant Higgs motioned toward a dark heap under the locust tree. For a moment he stood silent, then he spoke.

“Surgeons couldn’t ha’ saved him, Gerry--not a whole regiment of ’em marched out here two and two. When I put my hand to him, his flesh was already cold. He was about gone. I knew they wouldn’t come. I only sent you to get you away. You never been in battle, never seen men die before.”

“Your coat--?” faltered Gerry. Not that the coat mattered, but he felt he could not talk of anything that did.

“I laid it across his face,” said Higgs, clearing his throat. “Afterwards. It seemed more decent-like, somehow.”

Gerry sat down on the grass beside the little fire, there being nothing else to do. The moon had risen and was shining wanly down on the hills and pastures, on the roofs of Charlestown village. It made a path of silver across the black bay, a path to the lighted shores of Boston. Lanterns flashed in the midst of it, lanterns on the prows of the boats that were carrying the badly defeated British back to the town they had left so proudly the night before.

Gerry thought how he himself and the rest of the Twenty-third had marched out that morning, fifers playing “Yankee Doodle,” and colors lifting on the spring wind. They had marched inland by way of the Neck, through Roxbury to Cambridge, and so far, it was all a game. But the sport ceased near Lexington where they met their fleeing comrades who had gone to Concord to raid the Yankees’ powder magazine. Powerful grenadiers dropped exhausted and lay like dogs after a hunt, panting, their tongues hanging out. The Marines and Light Infantry scattered helter-skelter across the countryside, while the farmers fired at them from behind every wall and tree.

“Cover the retreat,” his regiment had been ordered, and they had done so, in a running battle all the way back to Cambridge. It was there that an officer had detailed him and his sergeant to help get the wounded away.