The Tory Widow (48 page)

“Apprehended and imprisoned,” Anne said.

“Oh my!” Wemyss asked. “On what charge?”

“Smuggling”—Sally blinked tearful eyes, her voice dropping to a whisper—“for the damned rebels!”

Softhearted Wemyss took her by the hand. “Poor, dear Miss Sally!”

“He's a lazy rascal—Jack is—too smart for his own good.” Sally sniffed. “But when the devil finds an idle man, he'll set him to work, na?”

“She's been fretful day and night,” Anne added with a knowing nod. “The conditions in the prisons being what they are these days . . .”

“Of course,” Wemyss agreed. “Simply appalling.”

Sally heaved a shuddered sigh. “The provost will hang poor Jack on th' morrow, and I was hopin' ye might . . .”

Wemyss interrupted, “I'm afraid, Miss Sally, as a lowly lieutenant, I can bring no influence to bear in such a case.”

“Och no, Mr. Wemyss,” Sally cried. “I dinna expect ye t' interfere with the King's justice, but Jack's th' onliest kin I have to speak of on this side of the water. He was like a brother to me when we were weans, an' I'm compelled t' give him some ease, on these, his last days on earth.” Sally buried her face in Wemyss's shoulder, and sobbed.

“Your help in facilitating the delivery of some small amenity to a condemned man will be of great comfort to our Sally,” Anne added.

“There, there . . . please don't take on so.” Wemyss patted Sally on the back. “I'm certain we will be able to sort something out.”

 

 

IT squeaked. “Wake up, mister.”

Jack shrugged away the tug on his shirtsleeve. Sitting slouched against the wall beside a broken tumble of clay sugar cones, he groaned and covered his ears. A steady, resounding clank akin to a blacksmith's hammer striking an anvil was now accompanying the incessant shrill whine in his head.

“Get up!” Someone gave his outstretched legs a kick. “Can't you hear they're ringing us down for supper?”

Ringing us down . . .
Jack was relieved to find the clank originated from somewhere other than the inside of his battered brain. He pulled his shirtfront over his nose in a vain attempt to filter the wretched smell of piss, shit and death, which along with the noise was a constant intrusion upon his fitful sleep.
What a stink . . .

“If 'n you don't get up, you won't get your share,” the squeaky voice persisted.

Jack did not want to, but he opened his eyes to view his tormentors.

Boys
.

Hugging knees to chest, Jack buried his face in his arms.

The skinny boy squatting at his right began to poking him in the ribs. “C'mon, mister . . . your rations . . .”

“Leave me be.” Jack uttered his first words since setting foot inside the prison, swatting at the sharp finger. “I don't care about any rations.”

The taller boy standing beside the squatting boy gave Jack a shove to the shoulder. “Get up, you selfish old bugger!”

Jack jerked his head up, bared his teeth and snarled, “Shove off !” but the two were not impressed.

“You have t' claim your share,” the squatting boy advised with a wise nod. “If you don't want 'em, your rations can be splits amongst them that are hungerin'.”

“Selfish old bugger!” the other repeated.

Them that are hungering.
Jack pushed up to a stand, and dusted his palms off on his breeches. “Alright, alright . . . I need to piss anyway.”

“Best wait 'til we're in the yard for that,” the older boy advised.

The younger boy pinched his nose, turning his squeaky voice into an odd nasal drone. “The shit tubs is overflowin'—ain't been emptied in days.”

The taller boy led the way past rows of slow-moving men rising from beds of moldering, vermin-infested straw. The British held only a portion of the four thousand captured Patriot soldiers in this five-story building. Between the sick and dying men too feeble to rise and seek out their rations, and the stream of ill-kempt, cadaverous men funneling down the stairway in a slow shuffle, Jack had gauged that close to six hundred prisoners of war suffered the filth and deprivation of Cortlandt's Sugar House.

“We had our eye on you—saw that drunken bastard O'Keefe and the mulatto hangman bring you in yesterday.” Bobbing along beside Jack, the smaller boy offered his hand in greeting. “I'm Jim Griffin.”

Jack took the thin hand. “Jack Hampton.”

It would be generous to say the boy was skin and bone. His wide blue eyes were a bright contrast to the rest of him, mired under a layer of grime from the top of his ill-shorn head to the chipped and cracked nails on his bare toes. A clacking pair of drumsticks and a wooden canteen were strung to a shred of burlap sacking tied at his waist. The sleeve on his tattered shirt was crudely mended at the shoulder with knotted bits of twine, and his filthy breeches had frayed away to expose scabby, bony knees.

Jack jerked his head toward the taller boy. “That pleasant fellow your brother?”

“Him and me are brothers in arms,” answered Jim, giving his friend a slap on the back.

The taller boy turned with an apologetic grin and shook Jack's hand as well. “Brian Eliot, of Rawlings's Maryland Riflemen.” He fell back to flank Jack. “Sorry 'bout being so rough on you. I find I don't have much patience for newcomers when my stomach worm gets to gnawing.”

Brian bore in his voice the soft twang of a Southerner. He was year or two older and a few inches taller than Jim, but just as gaunt. His shoulder-length hair was drawn into a greasy tail, and tied with a strip of cloth torn from the filthy rifleman's frock shirt he wore gathered at his slim waist with a tooled leather belt.

Jack pointed to the foot-long piece of iron sheathed on Brian's belt. “That's a nasty looking sticker you carry, brother.”

Brian smiled proud, and slipped his makeshift weapon out for Jack to admire. The young rifleman had somewhere scavenged a flat strap door hinge, and sharpened the decorative fleur-de-lis end to a menacing point. “Keeps the boy-buggerers and thieves away, don't it, Jim?”

“Aye that.” Jim grinned. “Don't nobody bother us no more.”

“How long you boys been in here?” Jack asked.

“Brian was amongst them who was captured at Fort Washington back in November,” Jim said. “I've been here longer—I was drumming for Atlee's musketry battalion on Brooklyn when we was boxed in and captured by Cornwallis.”

They shuffled down four flights of stairs to the main floor—past a square-jawed Hessian soldier beating his musket butt to a big iron sugar cauldron—and out into an open area within a tall palisade adjacent to the sugarhouse. A company of surly faced, blue-jacketed Hessians guarded the enclosure and distributed rations. Jack joined the line waiting to collect a share for the week—a paper-wrapped packet of hardtack along with a dripping one-pound chunk of pickled pork.

A Redcoat sergeant accompanied by a drummer boy came in through the gate and addressed the captives. After marching up and down the line in an annoying spate of drumming, the sergeant called out, “Step up, lads, and volunteer! Reclaim yer honor and sign on to take the King's shilling. Put an end to yer misery—yer rebellion has been squashed flatter than a French pancake.”

There was a bristling among the prisoners—eyes shifting to and fro—each man bolstering his fellow with a nudge or a glance, and not a single man taking up what was, under the circumstances, a very tempting offer.

“C'mon, lads,” the sergeant urged. “I'll stand any man who steps up to take the oath to a pint.”

“D'ruther drink my own piss, than drink with the likes of you,” a lanky Virginian drawled.

A voice shouted, “Bugger off, ye wee lickspigot!”

“Aye,” another yelled, “you and yer whole shitten army.”

The recruiting sergeant rolled his eyes. “God rot yiz all, then—fools! Fuckin' stupid rebel sods.” He gave his drummer a nudge, and they left the yard in search of a friendlier audience.

“Here you go, boys—” Jack handed off his rations, adding, with as much swagger as he could muster, “Wasted on me, seeing as how I'm due for a neck stretching on the morrow.”

Neither boy hesitated. Jim took the hardtack, Brian took the meat, and Jack knew the friends would come to a fair reckoning in divvying up the extra food they'd earned for keeping a sharp eye on the comings and goings of the provost's minions.

“Thank you kindly, Jack.” Brian slipped his rations inside his shirt.

“Me and him figured you for a goner.” Jim pulled out a biscuit and sniffed it. “O'Keefe only deals with those destined to dangle. You fellas never seem to be very hungry.” He cracked the hardtack in two. It was writhing with weevils. The boy broke up the biscuit and flicked out most of the vermin before sifting the crumbs into his mouth.

“What'd you do t' warrant a neck stretchin'?” Brian asked.

“I got caught trying to smuggle a boatload of British Army stores to Washington.”

“A-yup.” Brian nodded. “High treason. That'll do it.”

“A good thing to swing for, I reckon,” Jim said, uncorking the stopper on his canteen. “Cheers to you, Jack!”

Jack bid the boys farewell, and went off to join a long row of ragged scarecrows relieving themselves against the fencing. Finishing his business, and buttoning his breeches, he turned to find the boys waiting for him.

“We want you to come with us to our place,” Brian said.

“C'mon . . .” Jim leaned in with a wave and a whisper. “We got something you'll want to see.”

Jack followed the boys back into the building, through the river of men still flowing into the small yard for food and fresh air, to a narrow staircase leading down to the cellar.

“I don't know . . .” Jack stopped at the top of the stairs. “Whatever you're after, boys, I'd rather just hand it over than suffer a thump to the head or the business end of that sticker.”

Brian crisscrossed his thumb over his heart. “We mean you no harm.”

“I promise you're gonna like our place,” Jim added. “You're a true Patriot, just like us.”

Jack followed the boys down the stairs, where they negotiated the dank maze of corridors with the ease of nocturnal prowlers. He kept up with a grip on Jim's bony shoulder knob while his eyes adjusted to the darkness, careful to avoid stepping on the squeaking swarm of rodents retreating as the threesome pressed forward.

They came to a cobwebbed barricade made up of several big sugar barrels, a heavy, fallen-down ceiling timber and an old broken barrow. “There it is.” Brian pointed out a half-hidden padlocked door. “We found it when we were rat huntin'.” He scooted under the downed ceiling beam. “Watch your head . . .”

“We tapped the pins from the hinges,” Jim explained as Brian pried the door open at the hinge side with the flat end of his iron sticker. Jack followed them in, squeezing through the narrow opening.

Brian called out, “Hold still while I get us a light.”

In the rustling darkness, Jack heard the comforting sound of flint striking steel. After a few failed, flashing attempts, the tinder—a frizzle of old burlap sacking—caught a spark.

“We found a whole cask of whale oil in here,” Brian explained as he nurtured the flame and transferred it to a twist of paper to light the wick on a large glass-chimneyed oil lamp, bathing the small room in a golden, wavering light.

“We eats a spoonful once a week,” Jim added, scrunching his face. “Brian says it does us good.”

The boys unloaded their rations onto the same counter that held the lamp—a long wooden desk fitted with a series of cubbyholes still stocked with a dusty assortment of paper labels, tags and blank bills of lading.

The room was no bigger than ten foot square, and Jack stood in the center of the dirt floor, gazing in wonder about him. “My word! These are very fine . . .”

Jim elbowed Brian. “See, I knew he'd like 'em.”

Jack wandered the perimeter of the room, examining a series of intricate scenes rendered in black on the smooth plaster walls. “Who drew them?”

“We did,” Brian said. “Me and Jim—with chunks of charcoal we found in an old bin.”

“Trying to make our room a pleasant place,” Jim added. “Since there weren't no windows in here, we fashioned our own.”

Windows into worlds far beyond these prison walls . . .
The drawings were large, and each scene was framed in a heavy, broad stroke—a boy and a spotted hound running through a field of corn under a cloud-filled sky; a mother kneading dough before a cheery hearth, her baby asleep in a basket at her feet; two boys in straw hats lazing along a marshy shoreline, their hopeful lines cast; a family with hands joined in prayer, gathered around a table groaning with food.

The two drawing styles were distinct, but still, the subject matter was wrought with much skill, and Jack was struck by the beauty and peace conveyed in simple lines from the minds and hands of such young boys. The images were at once wonderful and painful for Jack to gaze upon. It broke his heart to think of the talent and dreams imprisoned and snuffed out in this awful place.

While the artists sat on the floor chewing on a supper of uncooked meat and moldy, weevil-infested biscuits, Jack took in each scene. Smiling, he began to compose the “window” he'd draw, if he were lucky enough to own such skill.

My beautiful Anne, standing at the compositor's table, teaching our daughter to set type—our tall son beside me, working the press, a stew pot simmering on the fire . . . and . . . and it will never be . . .
Jack lost his smile.
For I am a dead man.