A Marked Man (39 page)

John said nothing. From the kitchen, Abigail heard the friendly rumble of Sergeant Muldoon’s voice and the laughter of Pattie and the children.

“I suppose,” she replied after a moment, “that is something we shall all soon see.”

H
arry Knox and Lucy Fluckner were married in June of 1774. In April of 1775, a British regiment attempted to seize a colonial powder-store hidden at Concord, Massachusetts, some seventeen miles from Boston, an event that triggered the American Revolution. In the wake of the battles of Lexington and Concord, the British retreated to Boston and were besieged by a makeshift force of colonists camped on the mainland. Harry and Lucy Knox sneaked across the British lines to join the American forces, Lucy concealing Harry’s military sword, the story goes, in the lining of her cloak.

Thomas and Hannah Fluckner remained in Boston, still under siege by the colonial army, until March of the following year. In the dead of winter, Harry Knox led a small force of men to bring sixty British cannon three hundred miles through the snow from the captured British forts at Crown Point and Ticonderoga in the Hudson Valley—guns that comprised the colonial army’s first artillery, without which General Washington could never have driven the British from Boston. With the British evacuation of Boston, on March 17, 1776, the Fluckner family—along with hundreds of other Americans who remained loyal to the Crown—were passengers on the British ships that carried the British Army out of Boston. This ended the New England phase of the conflict. Lucy’s parents subsequently crossed to England and never saw their daughter again.

Harry Knox was promoted to Major General, and Lucy—cheerfully bearing an ever-increasing brood of babies—followed him from camp to camp for eight years of war, “fat, lively, and somewhat interfering,” renowned for dancing even that inveterate rug-cutter George Washington to a breathless standstill. After the war, as the only member of the Fluckner family not deemed a “traitor,” Lucy was awarded the whole of her father’s Maine lands—several million acres—where she and Harry built an enormous mansion and lived with their many children in baronial splendor. Harry Knox, who during the war founded the United States’ first officer-training school at the age of twenty-eight, went on to become George Washington’s first Secretary of War. Fort Knox and the city of Knoxville, Tennessee, are named after this extraordinary man. He died of peritonitis resulting from a swallowed chicken bone in 1806 at the age of fifty-six.