Today I begin a series of chapters from my first novel, "Crossing the River," about events in 1775 that began the Revolutionary War.
Characters Mentioned
Brewer, Jonathan – proprietor of a Waltham tavern
Browne, Captain John – 10th Regiment. One of three spies sent to Worcester and Concord
De Berniere, Ensign Henry – 10th Regiment, spy, scout for Colonel Smith
Gage, General Thomas – military governor and commanding general of British forces stationed in Boston
Howe, Corporal John – servant of Captain Brown. Spy
MacKenzie, Lieutenant Frederick – adjutant general of the 23rd Welsh Fusiliers Regiment of Foot. Amateur cartographer
MacKenzie, Nancy – Wife of Frederick MacKenzie
Map
Chapter One, “A Very Fine Country”
Feeling his wife's hand on his right shoulder, MacKenzie put down his quill.
“You laugh,” she teased.
Closing his eyes, he placed the back of his head against her enlarged abdomen.
“You are a sober sides, husband,” she said, cupping his right ear. “Pray that your soldiers hear you guffaw … on occasion.”
“Pah! Twould be the regiment’s ruination!”
“Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie, 23rd Welsh Fusiliers Regiment of Foot,” she mocked. “Lieutenant Discipline. Though at times, … devoted father.”
“At all times.”
“Would that the soldier with dirty cross belts receive such devotion.”
He chuckled.
“The proof, dear husband, is not to be found in your words but in your actions. Your daughters demand your attention.” She tapped his left shoulder.
He secured her forearm. He stroked it. As vivacious and radiant as when he had courted her, she was his counterweight to what with rare exception had been a tedious existence. “But a few minutes more, my dear,” he responded. “To order my thoughts.” Enjoying her close proximity, he gazed at the half-filled page of his journal.
“Ill-formed words, Frederick, from such an …”
“Ill-forged mind?”
“Orderly mind. You should not interrupt. Wiggly words I should have said. Pray what has aroused your humor? I must preserve it. Store it in a bottle.”
Face beaming, he pointed at his compressed lips.
“Speak, chuff cove! Do not make sport with me!” To observe him better, she walked half way around his desk.
He touched the folded dispatch beside his journal. “General Gage inquires if there are officers with drawing experience that would make sketches of the countryside.” He studied her expression.
“Why is that … basis for mirth?” The skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled.
“Tis not his words, my dear, but his intentions that I find amusing.”
“General Gage would enjoy your description of his intentions.”
“I will not provide him the opportunity.” He smiled, wryly. “You have misconstrued my meaning. His intention, to find somebody to ‘sketch the countryside,’ is reasonable. What amuses me is what he tries in this dispatch to hide.”
“Oh? And what, Mister Constable,” she said merrily, “is that?” She was surprised at his change of expression.
“Something rather dangerous actually. For those who volunteer.”
“Indeed.”
“He wants officers that will map roads and bridges to Worcester and just as probably Concord, where the provincials are storing powder and such. He desires, in a word, spies. Having the ability to draw.”
“And you?” she asked, after a lengthy pause.
“Not I.”
She maintained her doubting look. He felt a rush of temper.
“I sketch what interests me. As you well know,” he said, gruffly. “I am not a young whelp. I have you and our family and our future child to factor. I’ll not be risking my neck and your welfare to play at spying!”
“That is a comfort.”
“Somebody else, somebody reckless, will!” He touched his eyelids, blinked, tapped with an index finger his blotter. “You needn’t worry,” he said, less aggressively. “The General will having lean pickings. He should be the one to worry, not you.”
Neither her head, her arms, nor her hands moved. “Why does he want maps of roads and bridges?”
He scowled. “To know what obstacles lay before him when he sends foot soldiers. Nancy! Trust what I say! It will not be me!”
He watched her dissect his words.
At length she asked, “Will they fight?”
“Who?”
“The provincials! Your friends believe they’re cowards. Will they?”
“Have they not made preparations to?”
She studied him a full five seconds. “Attend your daughters when you deem it convenient,” she said. Averting her face, she left the room.
It was her accustomed way of punishing him.
Knowing that she expected him to follow, he stared, resentfully, at his written words.
“January 8, 1775. It has been signified to the Army, that if any officers of the different regiments are capable to taking sketches of a country, they are to send their names to the Deputy-Adjutant General.”
“Will they fight?” She had gotten to the heart of it.
Angry commoners in the Boston streets shouted their contempt daily. A year ago they had destroyed a ship’s entire cargo of tea. 4,000 soldiers were encamped on Boston’s narrow peninsula. Angry? Rebellious? Yes. Would they wage war against His Majesty's Foot? He didn’t think so.
Nevertheless, Gage's spies would operate at great risk. The General would do well not to select officers motivated by the desire for promotion, or fire brands ablaze for adventure. Who else but the reckless or the ambitious would apply? Gage needed experienced officers possessing wisdom, judgment. He would not get them. Utilizing those attributes, they would decline to volunteer.
As for the ability to draw maps, “I am afraid,” MacKenzie wrote, “not many officers of this Army will be found qualified for this service. It is a branch of Military education too little attended to, or sought by our officers, and yet is not only extremely necessary and useful in time of war, but very entertaining and instructive.”
2
The black woman who labored amongst the tables took little notice of the three men standing near the front doorway until one of them, a blonde-haired, lean-bodied youth, separating himself, walked toward the kitchen. Widowed, gregarious, passionate, she appraised his physical attributes. Afterward, she regarded, less lasciviously, his traveling companions, who were taking chairs at a nearby table.
One of them was two or three years older than the boy now in the kitchen. He was, perhaps, twenty-two, twenty-three, dark-featured, slightly built, angular-faced. She watched his eyes, his inquisitive eyes -- face devoid of expression -- study each customer while his companion, fifteen or twenty years his senior, spoke. When his eyes fastened upon her, feigning indifference, she looked away. Having collected empty tankards and dishes from a vacated table, she walked into the kitchen.
When she returned, the dark one was speaking to the older one. She studied the man who now listened. Broad forehead, round eyes in close to a thin nose, large lips -- a face his mother had probably regretted -- his was a countenance quite different from the many that demanded each day her service. Using a wet cloth, snorting derision, she brushed pastry crumbs off the top of an empty table.
When they spoke to her, telling her what they wanted, she knew they were British officers. The way they spoke, the way they moved their heads as they spoke, their gestures: all was too familiar. For six years she had worked in a Boston tavern off King Street, an establishment frequently attended by the scarlet-coated officers of His Majesty's foot.
She had quit her job there and had left Boston during the first week of December. One of her current employers, Jonathan Brewer, had hired her the week before Christmas. Normally thick-skinned, she had had more than her fill of the arrogant, besotted British gentleman. One could not smile, banter, or laugh indefinitely when the jibes she parried revealed a bigoted nastiness. With their first words the two officers at the table had exposed themselves. The one with the broad forehead and thin nose she had previously seen.
Angrily, she returned to the kitchen.
Who was he? His name! She believed she knew his name. She glanced at the not pretty but rather handsome youth eating kidney pie at a little table pushed against the far wall. He was not an officer. More probably he was a servant of the man whose name escaped her. Enlisted men never ate in the same room with officers, one fact of many that she had involuntarily gleaned from her Boston patrons.
“More ale for you, sir?” she asked.
He glanced up at her, grinned, started again to chew.
“So you like eating here in the kitchen t’eating with your friends? What's wrong with them now?” She laughed with good humor.
“Oh, they be weary o' me. They want t'talk, I think, ‘bout me, private like. They be strangers here 'bout, surveyors, y' know. They hired me t'show ‘em about. Now I think they might be wantin’ t’give me the boot.” He shrugged, offered her a silly grin.
“How do you weary them, boy? Do they not take t’funnin'? You have that look about you, seems to me.”
A mischievous grin. “Tis true, ma'am. Tis true. They're a stiff bunch, all serious like. They'll have their maps out in front o' them in a minute, you'll see. You watch.”
Well, she didn't resent him, despite his being a soldier -- he might have passed as a young apprentice had she not connected him. In truth, she fancied him, despite being four or five years his senior. But when had age mattered, she reminded herself, when the look of a light-hearted, well-featured man had stirred her?
The one in the other room, the one she had recognized, his name was Browne. Such a common name. It had come to her, effortlessly, while she had been thinking of the boy. She had seen Browne five years ago. Browne had come to the Boston tavern often, right up until the time of the Massacre. His regiment had then left the city. During the past three months -- during her absence -- the regiment had evidently returned. From Canada. What was he doing here, dressed in his silly costume, the same costume this boy and the dark officer wore? Pretending to be surveyors, wearing brown clothing with red handkerchiefs tied around their necks, country people they were pretending to be!
Standing in the passageway to the taproom, she saw that they had spread a map across the table. The dark officer was pointing a stiff forefinger at the center of it. Browne nodded. Oh yes, they were surveying. They were taking a lay of the land. They were spies, insulting her intelligence!
Well, she would play with them a bit. She would let them fancy their success. When they left the tavern, she would tell her employer. He would send their description to the local militia, and that would be the end of Officer Browne! Good riddance. But not of the boy in the kitchen.
Having served the two officers their food, she watched the blonde-haired servant finish his tankard of ale. Smiling across the kitchen at her, he placed the vessel noisily on the table. Straightening his legs, leaning backward, he sighed. She walked over to him.
“The bigger one in the other room. The one with the thin nose. I know him.”
His eyes flashed. “Oh, I don't think so. They be strangers to the county, like I said. They've not been here before.” He looked at her guilelessly.
Oh, he was good, likable, convincing.
“I know your Captain Browne from a Boston tavern where I worked, maybe five years ago. I know your errand. You mean to take a plan of the country for your General Gage, I think.”
He moved his legs, then his upper body. He started to rise. Placing a hand on his left shoulder, she said, “I'll not betray you, not yet; rest easy. Let your friends enjoy their pie and ale. Once on the road, …”
The young man stared at the pie crumbs on his dish. He shrugged, then grinned. Sitting, then lifting his tankard, he said, “I'll be havin’ some more ale. Bein’ that Captain Browne does pay for it.”
“The young lad in the kitchen says you are surveyors,” she said as they stood to leave. Wanting him to recognize her, she stared at the older man.
“Just so. A very fine country hereabouts,” Browne replied, as though he were answering a voice.
She slammed his empty tankard upon the table. He stared at her, his startled eyes crowding the bridge of his nose.
“It is a very fine country!” she exclaimed. “And we have very fine and brave men to fight for it!”
He blinked, twice, several times more.
“If you travel much farther you will find out that is true!”
If he had learned anything the past half-hour, maybe it was that staring at a dirty windowpane changed nothing.
Well before they had been rowed across the river he had accepted the fact that their mission entailed risk. He had not expected immediate difficulties.
The third son of a privileged family, Henry De Berniere, meticulous, resourceful, was not habituated to defeat. From his boyhood to his present situation, proceeding logically, methodically, he had achieved his ambitious goals with admirable constancy. Commissioned an ensign at nineteen, at twenty-one bored, disaffected, he had a month ago employed his particular talents to attempt to achieve that most difficult of martial accomplishments, career promotion.
Before responding to General Gage's request for volunteer officers to map the roads to provincial military depositories, De Berniere had analyzed the risks. Paramount would be the difficulty of being what he was not, a colonial commoner. After he had submitted his request to serve, he had spent four days in the streets and taverns of Boston listening to the syntax and vocabulary of the populace. He had written down each night much of what he had heard. To demonstrate initiative during his interview with the Commanding General he had raised the speech difficulty and what he had done to try to surmount it. He had also presented a precisely drawn, detailed sketch of the roads and bridges of his parents’ parish, in Warwickshire. Analysis, preparation, performance. What he had not anticipated about his mission were, one, the limitations imposed upon him by his superiors and, two, capricious coincidence.
He had been upset about the clothing that he, Captain Browne, and Browne’s man had been obliged to wear. They had begun this first day in virtually identical dress. Who in the commanding general’s service had made that decision? A quartermaster sergeant, he surmised.
Then there was Captain Browne, De Berniere’s immediate superior. The man was dense, obtuse, fence post stupid! His performance this day had been appalling! Why had he been selected?!
Several reasons, De Berniere supposed. One, a senior officer had to lead; two, Browne also wanted promotion; three, Browne, having spent several years garrisoned in Boston, “knew” the populace; and, four, very few senior officers, perhaps only he, had volunteered.
De Berniere had not yet concluded his evaluation of Browne's servant, John Howe. Watching Howe arranging towels across the back of a chair preparatory to procuring hot water for their baths, De Berniere suspicioned that the servant was more percipient than his master.
Howe spoke and behaved much like the Boston commoners that De Berniere had observed. He had not this day embarrassed himself. He had exhibited an alert mind and a readiness to act. Outside the Waltham tavern Howe had explained the behavior of the serving woman. With a rush of advice for which he had immediately, ingratiatingly apologized, Howe, stating the obvious, had recommended immediate haste.
A teamster had overtaken them a mile or so down the road. De Berniere had persuaded the man to carry them. Almost immediately, he, and Howe, but not Browne, had recognized his blunder.
The teamster's companion had instantly aroused De Berniere’s suspicion. The tense young man would not look at them. His body resisted the wagon’s jostle. His hair had been cropped, unnaturally, at the back. A deserter, De Berniere had concluded, a guileless simpleton spirited from the city by Sons of Liberty, driven westward by a teamster militiaman.
Howe’s eyes had revealed the same conclusion. Twice Howe had glanced at the “deserter,” then at the teamster, then at De Berniere, before De Berniere had nodded acknowledgment. Browne, jostled by the wagon's movement, had stared vacantly at wet fields.
The teamster’s silence the first fifteen minutes of their journey had added weight to De Berniere’s supposition. A taciturn man voices a word or two in passing, De Berniere had reasoned. This man, maintaining his hard look at the road, schemes our arrest!
“’Spect I could take you the entire way t’Worcester,” the driver had thereupon declared, confirming De Berniere’s judgment. “I do have business there. Might as well get it done t’day.”
“Thank you, no,” De Berniere had declared, before Browne had been able to speak. They had reached the crest of a low hill. Seeing several distant buildings in the hollow beyond, concluding that they were approaching Weston, he had said, “We aim to be let out at the next tavern.”
Thereafter, the wagon driver had watched the road. Answering Browne’s perplexed expression, De Berniere had nodded at the deserter. Browne’s subsequent furrowed brow had vexed him. Belatedly, Browne had answered, “Yes, the next tavern, please.”
“Stop here, please,” De Berniere had said, sharply, when the wagon had closed to within twenty yards of the tavern.
Offering no acknowledgment, the teamster had kept his horses moving. De Berniere had imagined the three of them having to jump from the wagon a mile or two down the road to hide in thicket and pine. But, no. The man had pulled his horses suddenly -- angrily, De Berniere had judged -- to a stop directly in front of the building.
Captain Browne had displayed his stupidity again when they had seated themselves for refreshment.
“May we have coffee?” Browne had asked the landlord, having been warned in Boston not to request tea.
Straightening, the landlord had answered, “You may have what you please, either tea or coffee.” Staring at the man’s inquiring eyes, De Berniere had divined his message, that he was a Loyalist, that he recognized them to be soldiers, and that he wanted his presumption corroborated by their selection of tea.
“Coffee. I said coffee!” Browne had answered.
“Tea, actually,” De Berniere had corrected, witnessing immediately Browne's confusion, then resentment.
De Berniere stepped away from the window. His window-staring had, in fact, benefited him. Analyzing the day’s events, he had drawn conclusions.
He had isolated three difficulties. Foremost of these was Browne's impercipience. Somehow, subtly, De Berniere had to lead, without Browne knowing it.
Another difficulty had been the landlord’s lack of cooperation. Two hours ago, having accompanied them to their room, the man had given Browne the names of safe taverns in Framingham and Worcester but nothing else. He either did not known where the Worcester military stores were hidden or he had chosen not to tell them. Being obtuse, Browne had not asked. Because the man had not wanted to talk, De Berniere, not wanting to prolong the landlord’s unprofitable stay, had chosen not to question him.
Other than downstairs where he conducted business the landlord did not want to be seen with them. This had caused De Berniere to draw two inferences. The locals were vindictive toward anybody that harbored British spies. And any local with two eyes to see knew -- the third difficulty that he had isolated -- that they were indeed spies!
He recalled the time before his eighteenth birthday when he had waded into the ocean to impress two female cousins. A strong undertow had carried him one hundred yards off shore. Thrashing against the current, he had feared that the shore was unreachable. It had taken him an hour to fight his way back.
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