The Schoolmaster's Daughter (44 page)

Someone was yanking on Benjamin's arm. It was Ezra, who pulled him down behind the wall and into the pit. Looking up, he saw Lumley, standing now, taking aim carefully, calmly, and just as he fired his musket soldiers poured over the walls. They used bayonets, running through men in their path. Benjamin was grabbed by the arm and shoved toward the back of the redoubt, stumbling over fallen bodies, boards, weapons, piles of dirt. The smoke was so thick that it was difficult to see the top of the wall. Men fell down into the pit, bleeding and crying out. There were few shots fired as they moved toward the small entrance to the redoubt. Dozens of men pushed to get through the narrow gap in the walls and Benjamin was crushed from all sides. Ezra kept pushing Benjamin ahead of him, and then suddenly they passed through the entrance and were outside.

Looking around, Benjamin shouted, “Lumley, where's Lumley?”

Ezra would not let go of his arm and kept pulling him away from the redoubt. There was shooting now, shots being fired by the redcoats lined up on the back wall, and, in the distance, there were groups of provincials who were firing up at them. Benjamin and Ezra ran until they were clear of the smoke, and then they stopped and looked back. The redoubt appeared to be smoldering, belching men from the cloud, many of them wounded, some being helped by others.

“Lumley?”
Benjamin thought he shouted, though he could barely hear his own voice.

I don't see him
, Ezra appeared to say.

He grabbed Benjamin's arm, but suddenly stood up straight, his body rigid. His fingers let go of Benjamin's, and then he fell forward in to the grass. Blood issued from a wound in his back, just below the right shoulder blade. Benjamin rolled him on to his side. The bullet had struck him in the chest, causing a smaller, neater wound.

Ezra's eyes were open and he appeared to be speaking.
Go. You must go
.

Benjamin took hold of both arms and yanked him off the ground. Ezra couldn't stand, and he began to fall, so Benjamin eased him down over his shoulder, and then began to walk slowly, following others on the path to Charlestown Neck.

In the early evening, Abigail made her way home. The streets were filled with stunned, horrified Bostonians, as well as hundreds of wounded soldiers who had been ferried back from Charlestown. Many redcoats used their rifles as crutches. They were bloodied, their uniforms torn and filthy. There were carts loaded with the dead. When the smoke had drifted off Bunker Hill, it was clear that the British had taken the redoubt; but there was nothing victorious about this army.

When she reached King's Chapel, she found Father sitting on the granite step, his back against a column. Dazed, he looked up at her and muttered something in Latin—she caught the word
clementia
: mercy.

“Where's Mother?”

At first he didn't seem to understand, but then he nodded toward the granary. “Do you know where Benjamin is?”

“Across the harbor, somewhere.”

“He was on that hill, I'm sure of it. My son, taking up arms against …”

“Father, you must go home.”

Confused, resigned, he said, “Perhaps you're right.”

She helped him to his feet—he didn't resist. He made his way down School Street, relying heavily on his cane.

Abigail went to the granary and pushed her way through the throng of soldiers that were being herded into the building. Inside, the vast open space was filled with men. They lay and sat on the floorboards. There was a harrowing din. Men with gaping wounds and shattered limbs were crying out, moaning, screaming. There was the smell of dirt and gunpowder and blood. They were attended to by women mostly, but far too few, and there was little that was being done. Some distributed water from buckets. At the back of the building there were several tables where surgeons, their aprons smeared with blood, performed amputations.

Abigail found her mother, wrapping a soldier's head in a bandage. He had lost part of an ear. “Tear them up,” Mother said, nodding toward the bag on the floor.

Abigail opened the bag and pulled out some of her dresses and petticoats. There was, sitting on the floor in front of her, a soldier, a boy really, who was missing several fingers on his left hand. His face was pale and fine blue veins stood out on his forehead. Abigail tore her petticoat, creating a long strip of white linen.

“Let's have a look at that,” she said. The boy was reluctant, and holding out her hand she said, “What's your name?”

His eyes reminded her of a cat, observant, wary. “Liam, missus.”

“And where are you from, Liam?”

“Newcastle.”

“That's up north, isn't it?”

“Yes, Ma'am. On the River Tyne—near Hadrian's Wall?”

“It must be beautiful.”

“Aye, it is.” Carefully, he placed his wounded hand in hers, never taking his eyes off her as she began to wrap it in her petticoat linen.

With the help of others, Benjamin got Ezra to Winter Hill, where the provincials dug another line of defense. The field hospital had been established on the western slope. In the distance, beyond pastures and copses were the fine homes of Cambridge and brick buildings of Harvard College. Farm girls carried pails of water among the wounded and one of them offered Benjamin a tin cup.

“A surgeon will tend to you soon,” he said, holding the cup to Ezra's mouth.

Most of the water ran down Ezra's chin. His face was pale, reminding Benjamin of the sand-side of a flounder. His shirt was slick with blood. “No matter,” he whispered. “I need to tell you something. Something you must convey to your sister. Please, be my courier, but I haven't time to write a letter.” His smile was weak. “So I'll have to tell you.”

“You can tell her yourself.”

“No,” Ezra said. “Listen, I know I hurt her deeply, leaving Boston without full explanation. I made this terrible mistake, for which I am sorry.”

“You shouldn't exhaust yourself talking.”

Ezra ignored this. “That child my mother was raising in Concord?” he said. “You see, it's mine. There was a woman in Boston—she worked in a tavern—and she became pregnant. I was responsible. It was one night, an impulsive mistake, the result of too much ale. I am ashamed and completely at fault. Soon after, this girl tells me that she's with child, insisting that it can only be mine, and I believed her. She was horrified by this, and frightened—she was no deceiver. She said that her family refused to let her remain in their house. I was—I was devastated, Benjamin. I love Abigail, truly I do, and I couldn't bring myself to tell her of this situation. I was torn between love and responsibility, so I had no choice but to take the girl away from Boston. I just hoped that Abigail wouldn't find out, that she would forget me and … I took the girl to Concord, where my mother was with relatives.” He coughed, and blood ran out of the corner of his mouth. Benjamin daubed at it with his shirt sleeve, until Ezra weakly pushed his arm away. “So we left Boston, quickly, and when the baby came, the girl, she died. So my mother is tending to the baby, and now her health isn't good. Please tell Abigail that this was not as I intended it, and that I hope she can forgive me. I wish only that I could have remained in Boston, with her.” He looked once again at Benjamin. “You'll tell her? You'll explain it to her?”

“Of course.”

With great difficulty Ezra reached down into the pocket of his trousers and produced a stone. “When we were digging on Bunker Hill I found this—too large for the barrel of a gun.”

Ezra placed the stone in Benjamin's hand—it was white and smeared with blood from Ezra's fingers.

“An egg,” Benjamin said, looking at Ezra. “It's a perfect egg.”

“When you see Abigail, please give it to her.”

Benjamin gazed down at the stone in his palm and said, “I will.”

XXIX

Clementia

T
HROUGH THE NIGHT,
A
BIGAIL AND HER MOTHER TENDED TO THE
soldiers in the granary. They returned home shortly after dawn. Their exhaustion was relieved somewhat by the fact that Father prepared tea as soon as they entered the house. The city was in even greater chaos than the night before, as though the real cost of the battle were just sinking in, and groups of drunken soldiers could be heard roaming the streets, and frequently there was the sound of breaking glass—bottles smashed and shop windows being broken.

Father had closed the storm shutters. They sat at the darkened dining room without speaking. The air was stifling, and though Abigail and her mother had washed as best they could, the smell of blood still clung to them. At one point Mother offered her daughter the faintest smile; it was one thing they would always share: blood.

“The tea,” Father asked Abigail, “is it prepared all right?”

“It's fine,” she said, and then took another sip. “The best cup of tea I've ever had.”

Father appeared grateful, but then cleared his throat. “I went by James's, to see that they were all right, and I wondered if he might have some word of Benjamin. He hadn't.”

After a moment, Mother asked, “How does he fare?”

“James?” Father said, breaking off a corner of his biscuit. “He's abed—has been for days. Excited, distressed. Says that Dr. Warren was killed. Bullet right in the head—in the cheek. He wasn't running away but facing them.” He ate the biscuit. “That man stood up for what he believed in, I'll grant you that.”

Benjamin accompanied the cart that was bearing several provincials, including Ezra, back to Concord for burial. When they stopped during the night to eat at a tavern in Menotomy, he learned that Dr. Warren had been killed. Various rumors were argued, some claiming that the doctor's body had been buried on Bunker Hill, while others had heard that the body had been taken to Boston, where it was on display for the ridicule of the British soldiers. Benjamin also wondered what had become of Lumley. It would be better if he had been killed in the battle. There was no knowing what the British military would do with him if he was captured.

The cart reached Concord in the early morning, and Ezra was delivered to the home of his relatives. While the women laid the body out in the parlor, Ezra's mother was overtaken with grief and had to be helped back to bed. Benjamin went out into the yard, sat down in the shade of an elm, and despite the crying and keening and prayers that issued from the open windows of the house he fell asleep.

Abigail was awakened by the sound of boots and hooves out in School Street, and then there was a pounding on the front door. Not a knock, but pounding.

She got up and left her room, buttoning her dress as she descended the stairs. In the hall, she saw her father standing at the closed front door, with Mother behind him. As he opened the door, Abigail moved back into the kitchen. She could see soldiers gathered in the street and behind them a white horse—Samuel's horse—prancing nervously. All she could see of Samuel was his boots, straining in the stirrups as he tried to control his mount.

She knew he was as angry with himself as with her. There must have been great embarrassment when his superior officers realized that the field cannon were useless. How could he explain bringing the wrong ammunition across the harbor? But his humiliation must be deeper, privately so. In his bedchamber, there was the moment when his hard member sought to press into her, his hand guiding it, but he went rigid, and from his mouth, hot against the side of her neck, he released a long shuddering sigh. She felt the desperation in his embrace, as though he were clinging to life, and then the warmth of his discharge spread over her thighs. Now he must know that she had deceived him, but she wished he knew, wished he could understand how difficult it had been for her. She was certain that he wasn't here to ask politely for an explanation. It was all beyond explanations now. There was no reasoning, and no regrets, not now. There was only survival.

Abigail rushed out the kitchen door and took the key off the hook, and then, raising her skirts with both hands, she ran outside to the back fence. She opened the gate and entered the alley, chased by the sound of soldiers swarming through the house. Boots clattered on the stairs. A bowl smashed in the kitchen. Her mother protested and then shrieked. Abigail sprinted down the alley toward the Latin School. It was a small building, which Father had kept locked since the British marched out to Lexington and Concord in April. All the windows, she knew, were latched. She could hear soldiers outside now, in the dooryard behind her house, coming through the gate to the alley.

She went to the side door of the schoolhouse and unlocked it. Once inside, she locked the door again. From a rear window she could see several soldiers coming down the alley. Quickly, she went up the aisle between the wood benches where for years her father and brother had instructed the well-to-do sons of Boston. When she was young, she would sometimes sneak into the schoolhouse in the early morning. She would hide in a closet where supplies were kept, everything from brooms and mops (the boys were expected to keep their schoolroom clean) to stacks of books in English, Latin, Greek, and French. There was a small window in this closet, and once school was in session she would sit beneath it with a book in her lap and listen to the lesson. This was how at times at the dining room table she would respond to her father and brother when they spoke, say, Latin. James thought it funny, a sign of how clever his little sister was, while Father found it suspicious—though she always suspected that his blustery veneer was designed to conceal his pride.

She slipped into the closet just as she heard pounding on the locked outer door—they were using the butts of their rifles, and it didn't take a minute for her to hear splintering wood as they broke the door open. Their boots knocked on the floorboards as they moved about the classroom and through the offices on one side of the building. She quietly made her way to the back of the closet, where books were stacked on a crate. There was a small space between the wall and the crate, and she sat there in the corner, her knees drawn up to her chest. She tried to slow her breathing as she listened to the soldiers.