The Schoolmaster's Daughter (11 page)

A redcoat.

After the engagement at North Bridge, nothing happened. No more shots were fired. The redcoats had retreated to the village. The smoke rising from the village had stopped—so the urgency of saving Concord from burning seemed to have passed. Some men went looking for food and beverage at nearby houses and taverns. For the time being, the provincials just seemed to evaporate in the heat of the day.

Ezra and Benjamin, sitting in the shade of a tree on Punkatasset Hill, shared the wallet of victuals: more salt cod, and bread. Below, they watched as the redcoat detail that had gone to Barrett's farm returned, meeting no resistance as they crossed North Bridge. They collected their wounded and took them into Concord. The dead, however, were left behind, lying in the sun. Benjamin's eye kept wandering back to one body, lying near the bridge. A boy with an axe had approached the soldier, who was already mortally injured and crawling on all fours. The boy took the axe to the soldier's head, and for a long time after the man lay in his own blood, moaning, but now he was quiet and still.

It was difficult to determine what the British were doing in the village. The soldiers would form a column, parade in one direction, stop, and then after a considerable wait, they would be ordered to march in the opposite direction.

Both sides seemed to be in shock, stunned by their encounter, regretful that it had occurred, and now neither could decide what to do next.

At least two hours passed, and then around noon the soldiers began to march out of Concord, taking the road back toward Lexington. There were no fife and drums, which in itself was a significant victory. The provincials began to follow the British column, at a distance, keeping to the woods. Ezra and Benjamin walked swiftly, sometimes jogging, through stands of trees. When they crossed pasture land, which locals called the Great Fields, it suddenly became apparent how many had responded to the alarm. Hundreds of men streamed across the field, creating rivulets in the long grass, which reminded Benjamin of the wind on the salt marsh.

They kept to the high ground. There was no order to it. Yet word was passed: about a mile from Concord there was a stream ahead, at Miriam's Corner. Get there before the British. And wait.

From the Great Fields they climbed up a wooded hill until they could see down to a fork in the road, one branch running north to Bedford, the other continuing east toward Lincoln and Lexington. Militia had gathered behind the Miriam farmhouse, barns, and outbuildings. Coming out from Concord, the British light infantry had been flanking both sides of the road, but here they would have to rejoin the column of grenadiers to take the narrow bridge across the stream.

The British column could be heard before it was seen, the sound of boots on the hard-packed dirt road. There was not the cadence of a march, but the shuffling sound of men who were tired. A cloud of dust rose above the trees. When they came into sight, the wounded could be seen walking between the columns. There were also a number of chaises, which carried other wounded.

“Officers,” Ezra whispered. “They wear those silver plates hung about their necks.”

As the column neared the bridge, the flanking infantrymen could be seen pinching in until they too were walking along the road. The men in the woods waited in silence. Benjamin thought that perhaps they were going to let the soldiers pass, allowing them to return to Boston without further harm. He was about to say as much to Ezra, when the first shot was fired, and then the shooting began, puffs of smoke drifting up through the trees until the hill was in a cloud. Soldiers fell, and the column broke into confusion. Some returned fire, but it was futile. Many ran for the bridge, and there they were soon shot. So many men piled up on the bridge that it became difficult for other soldiers to get across the stream.

Benjamin continued to reload the musket, his actions becoming swift and economical—the ramrod, he stabbed into the ground. His face and hands were coated with sweat, greasy and blackened with gun powder. Ezra was careful in his aim, and with almost every shot another soldier went down.
Officers
, he shouted. The barrage was so loud, Benjamin thought he would go deaf.

Abigail had gone to all of Benjamin's secret places—the ones she knew about—and found nothing. It was mid-afternoon and the heat and the sun shimmered off the water. The air didn't move and Boston was oddly quiet.

She had seen the redcoat several times. He kept his distance, often looking out from the corner of a house, once slipping behind a fishing smack on a cradle. It was then that she recognized him: the corporal. Lumley. The way the smell of liquor came off of him that dark night. The way he pinned her shoulders to the clapboard wall. The way Sergeant Munroe handled her breasts, until he found the letter. Angered, she began to walk back toward him. Scare him off, she hoped (he was, after all, hiding from her). She strode down the street, as though to flush him out there in that doorway, or there in the darkness of the barn door left ajar. But she didn't see him, and was startled when she heard footsteps to her left, running up an alley.

“I found you!”

It was Mariah Cole.

“What is it?” Abigail said. “Benjamin?”

Mariah emerged from the shade of the alley. “No, but I couldn't just sit mending baskets no longer, and I began to thinking.” She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the sun, and gazed up toward Trimount. “I was afraid you'd climb up there—alone.”

“Well—”

“Benjamin does go up there, you know. And as I said, I've been only as far as the lower pastures with him, but he …” She took her hand away and gazed at Abigail, her gray eyes large with regret. “I should have told you before, I suppose, but he has mentioned that he goes up there.”

“Why?”

Mariah shrugged, but then she smiled, now complicit. “So he can see. He once said there was a great view. He said you can see everything from there: Lechmere Point, the Mill Pond, Charlestown, the Mystic River, Noddle's Island, the open ocean. He's wanted to show me, but I wouldn't go up.”

“I will go up,” Abigail said. “Thank you, Mariah.”

“May I go, too?” Abigail looked at the girl, her face turned slightly toward the sun as she looked up at the Trimount. “I mean, you shouldn't venture there alone.”

“No,” Abigail said, glancing down the street. There was no sign of Lumley, though she doubted that he had fled. “I believe you're right. Please come, if you wish.”

There were three hills: Cotton Hill, named after the Reverend John Cotton, who used to have a house there; Beacon; and Mount Vernon, which was to the west, overlooking the Charles River. It was often referred to as Mount Whoredom, and it was a place where respectable women should not go. Everyone knew of the stories about men going up the hill where there were women of leisure waiting in caves and copses. Stories of all-night revelry, dance, drinking, and fornication. There were few diversions in the city, not a single theater was allowed, a lingering consequence of Boston's Puritanical heritage, and yet prostitutes abounded, obliging the needs and fancy of the king's men. Bostonians saw this as the result of their confinement with the soldiers on this small peninsula. And one need not look far to see that it was not just the behavior of the redcoats that encouraged wanton behavior. Many a young Bostonian woman was already well along on her wedding day.

As they climbed up through the lower pastures, Abigail continued to look downhill for any signs that they were being followed, but Corporal Lumley was nowhere in sight.

Finally, she said to Mariah, “You care for him, don't you?”

“Benjamin has a good heart.” Mariah swept strands of hair from her face. “I know your mother and father won't fancy me, being the daughter of a waterman.”

“They don't know you.”

“Are you afraid?”

Such a bold question—it took Abigail by surprise. “Why?”

“The way you look about, behind you, in front of you—”

“I'm looking for my brother and—and, yes, I'm afraid.”

Abigail felt better for having said it.

“I am, too,” Mariah said. “So many soldiers marched out into the country last night. I'm afeared people are dying out there.”

“I know. For too long, we've all known it would come to this.”

“When it comes, I just hope we fight back, whether we die or not.”

Abigail stopped walking and waited for Mariah to pause and turn toward her. They were both a little out of breath from the climb. “My parents should meet you, one day.” She smiled as she continued on up the path. “Not now, but one day, perhaps.”

Grazing cows paused to look at the two women as they strode by. They crossed Beacon Hill to Mount Vernon, where they passed a few caves, mere holes in the ground, or occasional gaps in the rocks. They saw no one. Abigail frequently looked behind them, but did not see Lumley. Finally, they reached the steep bluff which afforded a view, all of Boston spread beneath them, surrounded by water and islands. They could see how the currents and tides shaped the harbor and the Charles. Shoals were pale green, while the deeper channels ran ink-blue; vast green planes of salt marsh knotted with inlets and pools.

“My God,” Mariah whispered. “Will you look at this? It's worth fighting for, no?”

“Yes,” Abigail said. “Yes, it is.”

VI

Out of the Country

T
HEY CHASED THE REDCOATS ALL THE WAY BACK TO
L
EXINGTON.
The provincials swarmed ahead, racing through the woods, taking up positions behind trees, stone walls, and barns. The British were in complete confusion, leaving dead and wounded behind, firing at random into the woods. Their fat commander, Lieutenant Colonel Smith, was wounded while on horseback, so he dismounted and walked with the soldiers, hiding among them. Major Pitcairn took command, but his horse was shot out from beneath him. Outside of Lexington, his officers drew their sabers and stood at the front of the panicked soldiers, swearing to cut down any man who did not form up in a column. As they fell in and marched, bedraggled and exhausted, the provincials continued to pick them off.

In Lexington there was an explosion. Word came up through the woods that a cannonball had struck the meetinghouse, and a mass of reinforcements had ventured out from Boston. Still more provincials arrived, and when the large formation of redcoats marched east toward Cambridge, the shooting continued. There was more of a threat to the provincials now, as packs of light infantrymen were seen running up into the woods.

When Ezra and Benjamin came to a farm in Menotomy, they sought food and water. The back door was open, and when they stepped into the kitchen they found a woman lying on the floor in a pool of blood. The saber slash had nearly severed her head. At the table an elderly man sat upright in his chair, a gaping bullet wound in his chest. Ezra picked up the pistol that lay on the table and handed it to Benjamin.

“Loaded, not even fired.”

Benjamin had never held a pistol before and he liked its weight.

“No food,” Ezra said, opening a tin on the sideboard, which was smeared with grease and breadcrumbs. “They're looking for the same thing.”

He paused in the door, scanning the yard. “Careful, now.”

They left the farm, crossed a plowed field, and entered the woods. By a stone wall, they found two men and a boy not ten years old, all shot in the back.

“We should have done more,” Ezra said. “We should have left nothing—not one saber, not one firearm—for the reinforcements to bring back to Boston. They came out to destroy us, and we're losing our chance to destroy them. We might have ended it today. But this is only the beginning.”

They kept to the stone wall in the woods. Up ahead they could hear shooting.

In Cambridge, the British were approaching another fork in the road, Ezra explained, but this time they knew enough not to take the bridge south across the Charles River that would lead them down to the Neck. Their only choice was to take the road east, which led to Charlestown; from there they could be ferried to Boston.

The provincials pursued the British column through Cambridge, though at a greater distance because here the land was more open. Ezra and Benjamin encountered the work of the light infantry: provincials lying dead and wounded among trees and in barnyards. By late afternoon, Ezra had only one cartridge left. Many provincials had gone home once they were out of ammunition, but Ezra said he wanted to stay, wanted to fire his last shot just as the redcoats crossed the spit of land that connected to the Charlestown peninsula. As they moved through the countryside, they could seldom see the column, though they could hear their boots and see the dust rising in the sky above them.

“We're chasing them all the way back to Boston,” Ezra said.

“And then what?” Benjamin asked.

Ezra didn't answer at first, but then said, “I don't know, but Boston is not a place
I'd
want to be.”

Not far outside Charlestown there was a wooden cage hanging from a tree next to the road. It had been there for years and contained the remains of a slave who had tried to escape his owner. There was nothing now but bones tangled in a heap of rags. Benjamin and Ezra lay in a stand of trees about a hundred yards away, watching the British soldiers pass beneath the tree. Many paused to look up at the cage, though some appeared too spent to even notice.

“Everywhere, signs of reprimand and punishment,” Ezra said. “Someday they'll cut that cage down, I suppose, even though owning a slave is your right. Seems odd, though, all this business about liberty, yet we still keep slaves.”

“I know a black man, from Haiti,” Benjamin said. “Works at the granary. Often see him out in the harbor, fishing or digging clams. I lost an oar once and a storm was coming up, and he towed me in against the outgoing tide. Name's Obadiah.”