Bunker Hill (13 page)

“Surely he
was jesting,” Prudence Hallsbury said. “And you are not to take my losses as
your own, Sir Henry. If I had played well, they would be far less.”

“Nonsense!”
Clinton said gallantly. “Nevertheless,” Sir William said, “I shall, if you
wish, my darling Betsy, take this poltroon to a field of honor. Witch indeed.”

“Absolutely not!
What
should we do for a hand at whist? Or two hands, for that matter, since I am
certain that both you excellent gentlemen are splendid marksmen and would end
up shooting each other.”

“Hear!
Hear!” Clinton exclaimed. “Of course,” Mrs. Hallsbury said, “there is always
that very handsome General Burgoyne.” “My dear Prudence,” Clinton said, “how
can you.”
And turning to Mrs. Loring, “I apologize most
humbly.”

“Sir
William, shall I accept his apology?”

“I think
so, my dear. We have a limited number of talented officers, and I am too old
for fields of honor.”

“Never too old!”
She rose,
went around the table, and bent to kiss Sir William demurely on his cheek.
“Now, excuse me for my toilet. Will you accompany me, Prudence?”

Prudence
rose, dropped a curtsy, and then, along with Mrs. Loring, went off to the
closet the club kept for ladies. Sir William leaned back in his chair, rubbed
his hands together, and said to Clinton, “Would you regard this rebellion as
misfortune or as good fortune, Sir Henry?”

Clinton
took snuff before answering, shook out his lace cuffs, and replied to the
effect that no military man should regard war as misfortune. “Any more than a
musician might regard music as a misfortune.”

“The best of situations.”

“Sir?”

“My wife is three thousand miles away.”

“And when
this is over, sir?” Clinton wondered.

“That is a
problem I shall face when the moment comes. Meanwhile, I am a happy man. That
is, insomuch as any man can call himself happy in this vale of tears. I have
had many women, Sir Henry, but in all my life—which has not been without
adventure— I have never met a woman like Mistress Elizabeth Loring. Have you
spoken to her husband?”

“As you requested, Sir William.”

“And pray, what was his response?”

“I think I
can say that he, too, is a happy man. All he could talk about was how he knew a
tailor in Boston who was the best uniform maker in the colonies. He wanted the
grenadiers because he fancies the headgear and the sword, but he’s a little
man, and he would be laughable in the grenadiers. I think he’s in love with the
motto—”

“
Nec Aspera Terrent?
”
Howe murmured.

“Do not fear the use of brutality.”

“Very
fitting,” Howe said. “Evidently, we’ve found us a proper jailer. No unhappiness
about Mrs. Loring?”

“The man’s as happy as a pig in an outhouse.”

“And did you find him a berth?”

“With the
Fifth Irish,” Clinton said, smiling. “Entirely proper, since the Irish know
pigs. As the number of prisoners grows, we’ll have to find more commodious
quarters than Boston jail.
Perhaps the hold of one of the
larger merchant ships.
That would keep him out of our hair.”

“Indeed.”
Sir William poured wine and raised his glass.
“To Captain
Joshua Loring of His Majesty’s Service.”

The ladies
returned now, and Mrs. Loring asked what
was the occasion of
the toast
.

“To the
peaceful and adoring cohabitation of the sexes,” Sir Henry answered.

“Then I think that we should drink to that,” Prudence
declared.

“I think we should drink to America,” Sir William
said.

F
eversham slept uneasily on the floor of the holding
room in the Palmers’ house, that is, when he slept at all—bits and pieces of
half
slumber,
awakened each time by his dreams. They
were not pleasant dreams. He had been a surgeon in three great battles, and he
hated war with all his heart. For the first time in years he longed for a
priest to hear his confession. But there were no priests in the army, and here
he was awaiting a battle that could be as bloody and awful as anything he had
ever seen. These were strange people, these Americans, with their endless talk
and bluster about equality and freedom. But they were an antidote to all that
his life had been, and they were the only hope he had found in his tortured
existence. They possessed a kind of innocence he had never encountered anywhere
else.

In eight
hours of backbreaking work, first under the burning sun and then in the
darkness, they had built the redoubt on Breed’s Hill. No orders were flung at
them. Gridley knew each of them by name, and his instructions were gentle and
easy. They were unhappy in taking the beds out of the abandoned homes. The
soldiers were poor people, and to take what belonged to other poor people sat
badly with them. They used their own clothing to back up the webbing and hold the
earth in place. Feversham had lived long enough in the tiny Connecticut village
of Ridgefìeld to know the work that went into these homespun garments and how
precious and irreplaceable they were.

They were
highly conscious of his status among them, an Englishman who had come over to
their side, a gentleman and a doctor. Their attitude toward him as a doctor was
a sort of veneration. A pickax, swung by a weary man, cut into the leg of
another. They watched Feversham clean and sew and bind the wound. He overheard
them talk about the incident. “You’ll stay with us tomorrow?” a boy of no more
than sixteen years asked him. It was up to Gridley. Quietly, Gridley told him,
“Warren is going to command here. The men have a feeling for you, but we can’t
have two doctors in one place. You said there were only fourteen beside you and
Warren?”

“Only fourteen.”

As the
redoubt was raised, the problem of placing the cannon faced them, the main
difficulty being in depressing the angle so that the shot might sweep men advancing
up the hill. Feversham’s respect for Gridley grew. One of the men, and older
man, had been with Gridley on the Plains of Abraham in the French war. There
would have been no victory for the British then had not Gridley managed to
raise the cannon up to the heights.

As
Feversham lay on the floor at the Palmers’ house, he lived over the struggle to
build the redoubt. He had left before the work was finished, summoned by Warren
to meet with the doctors once more and to oversee the division of bandages and
catgut and surgical tools. It was past midnight when he finally reached the
holding room, pulled off his boots, ate a few mouthfuls of bread and cheese
washed down by hot coffee as thin as tea, and settled
himself
to sleep and dream. He had meant to write another letter to his wife, but sheer
weariness and the impossibility of lighting a candle in a room where at least
six other men were sprawled on the floor asleep made writing impossible.
“Perhaps tomorrow,” he told himself, if there was to be a tomorrow.

He tried
to dream of his wife, but he had never been able to control a dream or direct
one to his desire. He was awakened from a dream of a battlefield covered with
dead soldiers, and he walked among them, searching for one he could minister
to. There were none. He had seen men with a slight bullet wound in the flesh of
one arm bind it up, ignore it, and go on fighting, and the wound would fester,
and the men would sicken and die. The whole world was wedded to the notion that
arguments could only be settled by death, and here was a British army that had
come three thousand miles to spread death among the farmers who had toiled all
their lives to scratch a living out of the soil of this hard New England land.

Sheer
weariness allowed Feversham to sleep, but it seemed to him that he had hardly
closed his eyes when someone shook him gently. He rolled over to see Betsy
Palmer holding a candlestick. “Forgive me, Dr. Feversham, but the officers are
to have a meeting here in the holding room, and I must make it clear for them.”

“What time
is it?” he asked thickly.

“Two o’clock in the morning.”

He sat up and sighed.
“All right.
It’s warm, isn’t it?”

“Quite warm.”

“I’ll find
a place in the courtyard.”

“No, no. I
wish you could sleep. I don’t know how any of you can stand it. But General
Putnam wants you here. There’s water at the pump outside, and I’ll have hot
coffee.”

Feversham
rose and looked around him. A woman was lighting candles on the kitchen table.
The other men who had used the holding room as a place to sleep were picking
themselves up and wearily shuffling through the doorway. Feversham followed
them. Some of the men who had slept on the floor went off to a clump of bushes
to urinate. Others were at the pump. Feversham noticed Joseph Palmer, who was
lighting a post torch. The officers were arriving, tying their horses at the
hitching rail.

As
Feversham waited his turn at the pump, he observed Putnam and Gridley going
into the house. He splashed cold water on his face, rinsed his mouth, and felt
better—almost awake, almost alert. As he turned away from the pump, he heard
his name called, and he peered through the torchlight to see Warren
dismounting. Warren

joined
him and shook his hand warmly.

“How
do you feel?” Feversham asked.

“I think there’s medicine in
excitement, don’t you?”

Feversham
touched his head. “You’re feverish. No, I won’t instruct you.”

“I want to
thank you for what you did at the redoubt. This is our place and home and life,
but when a stranger like
yourself
comes to us, I feel
God smiles at us a little. Forgive me for being sentimental. It’s the fever,
I’m sure.”

Embarrassed,
Feversham only nodded.

“You’ll
come inside?” Warren asked.

“I need
the bushes over yonder. I’ll be inside.” Feversham went to the thicket to
urinate, thinking how easily manner and custom collapsed at a time like this.
“Naked we come and naked we go,” he said to himself. “It strips away so easily.
What poor creatures we are, with our pretense at civilization.”

When he
entered the holding room, it was already crowded with the officers: Israel
Putnam, Artemus Ward, William Prescott, John Stark, Tom Knowlton, Richard
Gridley, Dr. Joseph Warren, and half a dozen others who were unfamiliar to
Feversham. They crowded around the table, some on benches, others standing.

Feversham
tried to remember rank. Warren, Ward, and Putnam were all generals, but as to
the others, who were colonels and who were captains he could not say. Since
only
a handful were
not in civilian clothes but in
uniforms of one militia company or another, there was no way for him to know
until an officer was addressed. For all of that, Feversham was sensitive enough
to feel the drama of the moment—the earnest, tired faces of the officers in the
flickering candlelight, the silence of fatigue that substituted for the chatter
that such a meeting in daylight would have occasioned, the strong smell of
sweat, the dirt on their shirts, and the curious setting in the holding room,
with the hams and sausages and cheeses hanging from the beams above them, the
kitchen of a serious and hardworking householder.

Mrs.
Palmer and her husband were handing out wooden or clay mugs, whatever they
could find to drink from, and pouring coffee for the officers. Only now, in the
relatively greater light of the holding room, with a dozen candles on the
table, did Feversham become aware of how Joseph Warren was dressed—trousers of
white satin, a gold-embroidered waistcoat over a silk shirt, a jabot of lace,
and a coat of beautifully embroidered silk.

He stood
up at the end of the long board table and tapped with his ring to gain their
attention and end the whispering. Again, Fevesham remarked to himself what an
interesting man this was, so tall and slender, with the long, sensitive face of
a poet.

“Let me
begin,” Joseph Warren said, “by apologizing for my festive garb. Those two wise
men, Colonel Gridley and Dr. Feversham, worked out a unique manner of building
a redoubt. But having only sand and stones to back up the webbing that holds
the walls in place, they called for pieces of cloth to reinforce the sand and
keep it in place. I decided to give them my entire wardrobe, and my good wife
would not do less. So I stand before you in the only clothes that remain to me,
and I am sure that before this day is over, they will be less ornate. With that
said,
may
I offer my heartfelt praise for what you and
our loyal comrades have accomplished these past fifteen hours. Where there was
confusion, there is now order, thanks to your tireless efforts. And where we
were a crowd, we are now an army, in position to fight. I now give the floor to
General Israel Putnam, our most beloved brother from Connecticut. He will
deliver the order of the day.”

Putnam
rose
, his gnarled hands clasped in front of his chin, and stood
for a long moment, glancing from face to face, and then said bluntly, “Here is
how we stand on the Charlestown peninsula.

Colonel William Prescott, as
you know, is in command of the general defense of Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill.
He has established our position. The order of the day is that we will fight to
the death so long as our ammunition holds. If we must retreat, we retreat in
good order, facing the enemy.”

He sat
back, and Prescott stood up, leaning over the table. “We are in a good position
from Bunker Hill and across the ridge to Breed’s Hill. The men stationed there
have the protection of stone walls. They have been working to connect the
separate pasture walls. General Putnam and his Connecticut men have taken up a
position on Bunker Hill. To protect their flank, Colonel Stark has taken a
stand with his riflemen, from the slope to the Mystic River. Colonel Stark,” he
said, nodding at a rangy, sunburned man who sat next to Gridley.

“We have a
fence of sorts where we are,” Stark said. “Irish we had a wall of stone, but
there’s no time for that. The hay in the pastures at our position is baled, and
God forgive me for taking the crop of honest farmers—we’re all of us Hampshire
farmers—but it’s our lives. We made a wall of the baled hay against the wood
fence. It won’t stop a bullet, but it will cover us. These are good Hampshire
riflemen, and I swear we’ll hold our side.”

“The
redoubt?” someone asked.

“Not
completely finished,” Gridley said, “but it’s in place. If you want the whole
picture, it’s four-square, forty paces to a side. The main attack side is
reinforced with woven leather and cloth. The rest is dirt and rocks. There are
slits and firing steps. Tomorrow, if there’s time before they attack, we’ll dig
a trench all along the one side where they can attack directly. There’s an old
clay pit there and good shelter, and that anchors Colonel Knowlton’s division.
He has a proper stone-wall barricade, maybe two hundred paces to connect with
Johnny Stark’s New Hampshire men. Am I right, Tom?”

Feversham
saw the man called Knowlton smile grimly, a hard-faced man in his forties with
a pair of tired blue eyes. “Yes, Richie, you paint a fine picture, and we’ve
been breaking our asses to make something of
that
two
hundred paces, but every time I turned around, half my men were gone for the
building of your damned redoubt. They’re so tired they can’t stand. I told them
to sleep. There are stones enough for Breed’s Hill. We never needed that damned
redoubt. You have a hundred men on the redoubt. What in hell are we building
the bloody fortress for! It’s indefensible!”

“We had
the argument yesterday and the day before,” Putnam snarled. “Let it go, Tom!”

“He’s
right!” someone cried. “It’s a death trap.”

“Ah,
please, please,” Warren begged them, rising and spreading his arms. “What
matters most is for us to be together.”

They had
enormous respect for him, and the hubbub of voices died down. Feversham
realized that this slender, aristocratic physician occupied a unique place
among these men. Feversham was new to the group, and he wondered what
circumstances led to their choice of Warren, a man with limited military
knowledge, as their leader. He had heard that Warren defied the British openly
in a manner that only Samuel Adams dared to match. Now the man was seriously
ill, if Feversham was any judge of sickness. Yet some fire within him rejected
sickness, as if spirit alone could make him whole.

“You gave
me the command of our forces,” Warren said gently. “Half of you fought in the
French war, and I bow to you. But if I must command, then I must. It was my
decision to build the redoubt. Now it is built. There are more important
matters to discuss.”

“You are
damn right!” Putnam boomed. “I didn’t want the redoubt, but it’s built. You
can’t saw sawdust. But it’s true that we wasted ourselves. Ward tells us that
they’ll attack tomorrow—”