Characters Mentioned
Barnes, Henry – Helpful Marlborough Tory
Bliss, Daniel – Concord Tory
Brewer, Jonathan – Waltham tavern owner
Browne, Captain John – 10th Regiment. One of three spies sent to Worcester and Concord
Coolidge, John – Watertown tavern owner
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
Jones, Isaac – Weston tavern owner
Smith, Lieutenant Colonel Francis – commander of the 10th Regiment, in charge of the expedition sent to Concord to seize rebel stores
Thomas, Benjamin – Tory Worcester merchant
Wetherby – friend of the black man that provided Howe refuge from a frigid night
Wheaton – Tory in whose cabin outside Weston Howe briefly stayed
Map
Chapter 4, “In Grave Danger,” Section 2
“He told you what?!” Isaac Jones touched his throat. “Jonathan Brewer is a rebel! So is Coolidge! Both of them know everything about me!” General Gage’s unopened letter, in Jones’s right hand, quivered.
“You d'think he's set a trap?”
Jones grinned, painfully. “Oh yes. You must leave, at once.” He saw that the young Englishman was not entirely convinced. Cockiness. Youthful invincibility. “Even if you hadn't gone to Coolidge’s tavern,” he emphasized, “you wouldn't be safe! Townspeople are much more suspicious of strangers now. No thanks to your companions’ last visit!”
Howe stared past Jones's left shoulder.
The proprietor’s fault-finding went deeper. Why hadn't General Gage sent the dark soldier, the one that measured what he said? This one, the quietest of the three, the deferential one, wasn't even an officer. To entrust matters of high importance to such an inferior!
“Where'll I go?”
“All right. I'll feed you. My servant will take you into the woods. I know a Tory there, Wheaton. You’ll stay with him.” Had his resentment gotten through? Too bad. The General's intended enterprise was beginning to look like a fool's errand, a repeat of the Salem expedition. He and others like him would end up suffering worse.
“Thank you,” the dull-witted soldier said.
“But no delay. I have a bad feeling about this.”
Howe spent the night and the following day inside Wheaton’s pine-shrouded cabin. In the late morning of the second day a gentle snow fell. After furnishing Howe information about the local militia, the Tory left Howe to himself. At 8:00 p.m. Isaac Jones's black servant returned.
At 11 p.m., thirty minutemen entered Jones’s Golden Ball Tavern, their purpose to arrest two British spies seen in John Coolidge’s establishment thirty-four hours earlier.
Leaving Wheaton's cabin, Howe and Jones’s servant followed a dark path through mixed hardwood and pine. Twenty minutes later they intersected the Marlborough road. They stopped for a few minutes at the bridge that spanned the Sudbury River, in part because Howe wanted to rest but in part to ascertain where the General’s soldiers could ford the river should the local militia choose to remove the bridge’s planks.
They arrived at Henry Barnes’s house at 2 a.m. While Esquire Barnes read General Gage's letter, Howe’s guide, expected back at Jones’s tavern before dawn, ate cold chicken in the kitchen. Taking the letter with him, Barnes escorted Howe to the guest bedchamber.
It seemed so brief a time before strong hands awakened him.
Militiamen? In the street?! At the front door?!
Henry Barnes was standing beside the bed.
“It's past noon,” the merchant said. “I have allowed you to sleep as long as I dared.”
Sunlight was streaming through the dormer window. Howe drew his legs out from beneath the bedding.
“I've been outside. People say a Sudbury woman saw two men last night, one white, the other a servant or slave. Both were studying the bridge.”
Howe compressed his lips.
“The woman was awake with a sick child. She saw them from an upstairs window. She said they crossed the bridge headed in this direction. Everyone here is looking for two British spies. You,” he said, pointing an index finger at Howe's nose, “must stay hidden. If the militia comes again to my house, you must hide in the swamp.”
Late that night Howe borrowed a horse. Snow speckling the shoulders of his coat, he rode into Worcester two hours before sunrise. He spent the new day with Benjamin Thomas, a Tory merchant whom Henry Barnes had credited. Thomas had compiled a list of Worcester’s munitions. After midnight, standing beside the Tory under the eave of a large tool shed, hands clamped in his armpits, Howe stared at the back of a nondescript, lean-to inside which was stored a large quantity of the town’s powder.
Nobody was about. Nobody before dawn, Howe believed, had seen the stranger on a brown horse ride stealthily into town. He believed that no militiaman had been assigned here to watch. Who would be willing to lose sleep to stare at shadows? Another chance occurrence -- a second woman, past midnight, spying out her window – seemed equally far-fetched.
A cat was moving about against the gray backdrop of the shed. Large bodied, entirely white, it touched its nose to something -- a tuft of coarse grass, Howe guessed, the scent of another animal, he supposed. Feeling exposed, he stepped farther back in the tool shed’s moon-shadow.
Spying was about finding things out and not getting caught. So why hadn’t Browne and De Berniere used the night? Looking out for his comfort, Browne would not have permitted it. As for De Berniere, Howe suspected the ensign would have wanted a clear look -- at the street, the shed, all the surrounding buildings -- so as to draw an accurate map. Howe believed that his rudimentary directions to and his description of the shed would serve just as well. It had all been easy. He had used common sense. He pictured Colonel Smith bumbling about in the dark.
Back inside Thomas’s house, Howe recorded in his journal the location of nearby wells, into which flour and cartridges might be dropped. Later, over Madeira wine, he and his host discussed the likely outcome of a forthcoming raid.
“I do not think any one of them will raise a musket,” Thomas declared. A graying man in his late forties, the Loyalist had strong opinions. Captain Browne and his officer friends shared them. “Faced with the steel of the bayonet, I think there can be no question about their conduct!”
Howe had a different opinion. Warming his shoeless feet by Thomas’s fire, he recalled the ignorant beliefs the district gentry held about country folk like him. Browne and his top-lofty friends were just as ignorant. So was this Loyalist.
“What say you, young man? I should like to hear your judgment. Do you concur?”
Reading his host’s expectant face, Howe was tempted to speak the truth. Had he not earned the right? And, having taken risks himself, didn’t this Tory deserve to hear it? “If you promise naught t'be tellin’.” He took in a deep breath. “If General Gage sends his entire force here with a train o’artillery, from Boston t’Worcester, … not one o' them’ll get back. Not one.”
Suffering a bitterly cold ride, Howe returned to Henry Barnes’s house before sunrise. At breakfast Howe showed the Loyalist his notes. Impressed, Barnes shared information about militia activity between Marlborough and Worcester, intelligence obtained during Howe’s absence. The previous day Howe had decided to visit Concord. During his lonely, star-bright journey he had weighed the danger of being recognized. He was reasonably certain that no one would recall him. He, De Berniere, and Browne had entered Daniel Bliss's house at dusk. He had left Concord very early the next morning, earlier than Browne and De Berniere, and he had stayed separated from them. He had spoken to no one. As far as any townsman might have judged, he could have been a tradesman from another town starting out early for Bedford or Lexington. Having convinced himself that the risk was minimal, early that evening he told Barnes his intention.
“Then you should go due east to Sudbury and from there proceed north. When it is darkest. I will station you in my garret. Leave through the window, about eight o’clock. But do so cautiously. They watch my front door every day, until about midnight.”
They entered the room in which Howe had slept. Barnes filled two glasses with brandy. Each drank to the other's good fortune and health. Afterward, Howe added his papers to the belongings in his handkerchief while Barnes poured himself a second glass. Howe placed the bundle on the little table beside the bed. Barnes poured brandy into Howe’s empty glass.
A heavy knock halted their activity. Each looked at the other. Barnes nodded.
Howe had gone about his business always at night. He had been wrong to have assumed that nobody had noticed. Somebody in Worcester that night, or here in Marlborough, had seen him moving about!
“Be quiet,” Barnes whispered. “If I don’t return in a minute, leave by the window. Slide down the roof of the shed. Run directly to the swamp. I’d better hide these glasses,” he added.
Howe heard Barnes's footsteps on the stairs. Then, nothing, until the door was opened. A loud voice.
“Esquire, we have come to search your house of spies!”
“I am willing,” Barnes responded.
Having thrown his hat and bundled handkerchief out the window, Howe eased himself onto the snowy roof. As he stooped to grasp his belongings, his right foot slid out from under him. Off the edge of the roof he skidded.
Spread-eagled beneath the eave, he labored to regain his breath. Snow covered the left side of his face, filled his left ear. He felt pain in his left hip.
He crawled over to his hat, then to his handkerchief, his left leg throbbing. He stood. Bent at the waist, he hobbled away from the house. He heard the crunch of snow beneath his shoes. He was leaving a trail. Looking back, he saw movement behind the lighted downstairs windows. He thought he heard horses in front of the house.
He continued past the smell of the swamp. The pain having subsided, he ran and then walked, four miles he estimated, in snow two inches deep. They could easily follow him. He had to keep walking. Walking would keep his blood pumping. God in Heaven, he was cold!
He risked stepping on rocks to cross a frigid brook. His leg throbbed as he pulled himself, grasping at exposed roots, up the opposite bank. Thereafter, he discovered a small clearing. Smelling smoke -- from a nearby chimney, he believed -- finding then a cabin, he chanced arrest.
Flintlock pistol held in his right hand, a gray-bearded black man answered Howe's knock.
“I've lost my way.” The man's face was leathery, deeply furrowed. “Where do I find the road t’Concord?”
“Who you be?!” Having stared at Howe five seconds more, the man looked at the corporal’s footprints. “What you be 'bout?”
“You d’have a fire in there. I see it. God Almighty, let me warm a bit. I'll be no harm t'you.”
The man measured him a second time. He drew the door farther back. “Who you be?”
Moments later Howe was crouching in front of the rude fireplace. Water from his coat dripped onto and disappeared between the pine floorboards. The man, having left the room, returned with a towel. “Who you be?” he asked again. A plump woman, the man’s wife, seated across the room, watched him.
“A gunsmith.” Howe had planned to present himself in Concord as such.
“Gunsmith, eh? T’Concord, you say? They do need gunsmiths there; that's a fact.” He took a pipe out of the right pocket of his framer’s frock and looked at the stem. “You better stay here. Too cold t' be out.” He put the towel over the back of a wooden chair.
“Thank you, no,” Howe responded. However much he needed warmth, he could not risk arrest. “I’m … wantin’ t’get t’Concord. T’get started.”
The man's mouth curled a bit, in disbelief?
“I'm expected there. I don't want t' worry 'em.”
The black man tapped ash from the bowl of his pipe. A log shifted on the grate. The man sat down by the fire.
“If you'll guide me there ….” The man looked at him, put the pipe stem in his mouth. “T’night. I can pay you.” Howe took from his coat pocket a sovereign, showed it. To offer the man tobacco, meager supply that he had, would not have answered.
The man nodded; Howe wondered if he had agreed or just acknowledged what he had said.
“I’ll be makin’ guns t’kill the regulars. The sooner the better. They be marchin’ out a Boston in a few weeks, I d’hear.”
The old woman spoke. “That be good; you make guns t’kill the regulars. They be a number a them by Esquire Barnes’s awhile back.”
“I need some tobacca,” her husband interrupted. “My friend, Wetherby, he be half way there. He got some. I’ll get my tobacca; he take you t'see Maj'r Buttrick. You pay Wetherby.” The man rose slowly from his chair. He shoved the empty pipe into his pocket. “I be gettin’ my coat.” He glanced at Howe with raised eyebrows. “They think regulars be out there soon, too.”
“Esquire Barnes, is he a Tory?” Howe asked the old woman, who had taken her husband’s chair by the fire.
“He is. Hidin’ spies, he was.” Nodding her head twice, she watched Howe open the front door. A draught of cold air agitated the fire.
“I hope they d’catch ‘em,” Howe answered. His host approached the doorway with his left arm not yet in the coat sleeve. “Catch ‘em an’ hang ‘em. Every last one o’ them.”
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