The Turncoat (21 page)

Eleven

It was the cotton wool sleep of the nursery, of warm summer afternoons and tame English landscapes, deep and untroubled by dreams. It lingered, until the numbness of waking became the numbness of cold and Peter Tremayne came back to himself lying faceup on a packed-dirt floor.

There was a blanket, or a greatcoat, spread beneath him. His shirt was missing and he could feel the weave of the coarse wool printing itself on his back. It hurt to swallow, and he could still taste powder in his mouth. He remembered the bullet tearing through his cheek. He probed gingerly with his tongue, then stopped abruptly when he felt a line of stitches running down the left side of his face, and a curious, elastic quality to the skin there.

He knew better than to try to move his left arm, which throbbed painfully and was thickly bandaged. “Where am I?” he croaked to the room at large. He did not expect an answer.

“We are inside Fort Mercer, my friend,” said Carl Donop, from somewhere off to the left.

Donop spoke a few words in German, quite softly, and Tremayne found his mind wandering, thinking that the guttural language could have a pleasing sibilance…when the gaunt, mustachioed face of the Grenadier sergeant who had hacked that torturous path through the abatis with him loomed overhead. He pressed a flagon to Tremayne’s lips, and dabbed gently when some of the drink escaped through the stitches in Tremayne’s cheek. It burned like hell.

It was brandy, fiery and warming, and for a few minutes it was all Tremayne could focus on. When he turned his head as much as the pain in his shoulder allowed, he discerned a small room, a guardhouse most likely, with roughly plastered walls and an unfinished ceiling. Wan daylight filtered through a single dirty window. There was a camp bed and a pitiful fire. From his place on the floor Tremayne could not see the occupant of the room’s only bed, but it must be Donop.

They were not the victors, then. Not if he was lying on the floor in a poorly heated cell. Tremayne addressed the bed, where he presumed his friend to be lying. “How bad is it, Carl?” he asked in French.

“At last count, four hundred dead, but the American colonel thinks the number will be as high as six hundred when they search the wood for bodies.”

“Dear God,” was all Tremayne could manage. The cream of the Hessian infantry, slaughtered. They’d left Philadelphia with more than a thousand men, the better part of them Grenadiers and Jaegers.
Six hundred dead
.

“And captured?” Tremayne asked.

“A few dozen, mostly dying. And twenty officers killed.”

“And the Americans?”

“Eight killed,” Donop said with grudging approval. “Bachmann here,” Donop went on, “pulled you from the abatis. He dragged you to the shelter of the wall and watched over you during the night. He surrendered on your behalf to the Americans this morning. I hope you won’t hold it against him. He probably saved the buttons on your coat from looters, at the very least.”

“I seem to have both arms. Tell him I’m grateful for that as well.”

Donop spoke softly in German once more and the Grenadier nodded at Tremayne. Then Donop said, “The bullet passed cleanly through your shoulder, but lodged in your arm, and took some digging to remove. You lost a great deal of blood, but the American doctor says the wound is clean and the bone untouched. But your face, Peter, will be the envy of every man in Philadelphia. A very good scar. Very attractive to the ladies.”

“But sadly not to my lady. She is a pacifist. Or likes to think she is,” Tremayne said, sitting up slowly and doing his best not to bend his arm. He had to return for Kate. Had to get her out of the city. He’d been gone too long already. “Sergeant Bachmann here has not, I take it, given the Americans my parole?” If the Hessian had already offered Tremayne’s word as a gentleman that he would not try to escape, he was bound to honor it.

He levered himself to his feet with the help of a nearby table, then crumpled to the ground in a boneless heap.

There was amusement in Donop’s voice, and something else, when he spoke next. “Ja. We are fifteen miles from Philadelphia, it is forty degrees, you have no shirt and have not eaten today, and you mean to attempt an escape. Forgive me for turning your own words against you, but what kind of woman is worth that?”

The kind who can argue politics with me from the floor of a moving carriage while casting up her accounts, thought Tremayne. Who is resourceful and brave and who trusted me to save her; who is a traitor and a spy, and engaged to my cousin. But he could tell Donop none of this. So he said, “Can you swim?” and mounted another attempt to get to his feet.

“To Philadelphia?” Donop lay propped up in the bed on an improvised bolster of flour sacks and rolled blankets. His blond hair had uncurled and was bound loosely in a scrap of silver lace at the back of his neck. He looked pale, and something about his posture in the bed was wrong.

“To the
Augusta
. She was supposed to be standing off from the fort. We should be able to get over the wall on the river side.” The land assault might have been a disaster, but the
Augusta
was a sixty-four-gun dreadnought, the biggest ship they had brought to Philadelphia. Mercer’s guns would not be enough to scare her off; American gunboats she could reduce to splinter and kindling, if their captains were fool enough to stand and fight.

A chancy business to reach the
Augusta
, but though Tremayne had spent fewer than three days in Donop’s company, he already understood the man well enough to know he’d be game for such an exploit. For the Hessian, it would almost be fun.

“Ah, yes, the mighty British Navy, which was supposed to support our attack. You might be able to get over the wall, my friend, but I cannot.”

The blanket that covered Donop’s legs was boiled wool. It lay in stiff folds, but this did not account for the unnatural angles beneath it. “My hip and thigh are shattered.”

Tremayne was stunned. “I am sorry, Carl,” he said, lowering himself into the chair at Donop’s bedside. Even in his dishevelment, Donop retained his native elegance, but the pain had to be nearly unbearable, and it told in the set of his jaw and his tightly clenched hands. A broken femur could be crippling, even deadly.

“Do not be. I am in the hands of honor itself. Their second in command is a Frenchman. They have brought a doctor to tend me. I have no fear of mistreatment. You must not stay on my account, although I do not think the
Augusta
will be your salvation. The Frenchman, Du Plessis-Mauduit, tells me two British ships ran aground last night, and one of them is burning.”

Tremayne felt light-headed, and while the throbbing in his arm had receded, it was replaced by a strange trickling warmth. He looked down at his bandaged arm and saw the spreading crimson, knew his wound had reopened.

“My friend, you are bleeding, and your lady, should you get so far as Philadelphia, will not thank you for soiling her carpets.” Donop called for Bachmann. There was shouting, in French and in German, and then finally in English, but it all sounded a long way off to Termayne, and the room blurred as two more men entered and someone—a doctor, he supposed—helped carry him to his pallet and began unraveling bandages. He could not make out their muffled words, so he lay unresisting while they worked busily to staunch the blood.

Then there was a noise. The floor shook, the windows blew in, showering glass, and Tremayne’s ears suddenly cleared.

“What was that?” he asked, from his place on the still-trembling floor.

“I suspect,” said Donop, “
that
was the powder magazine of the
Augusta
.”

*   *   *

T
hey were moved to a private house, just outside the walls of the fort, later that afternoon. By then Tremayne had realized escape was unlikely. He had lost too much blood. It might have been possible—just—to slip away in the confused hours immediately following the attack, but he had been too weak then and by the time he was conscious they were well guarded. And Carl. Carl was not going anywhere.

Donop had been silent as they carried him, lying flat on the camp bed, into Ann Whitall’s pretty brick house. To give the Americans credit, they’d set six men to lift the Hessian. The doctor, Tilden, had supervised the effort and done everything in his power to keep the bed and his patient level, but by the time they were settled, Donop’s face was as white as his linen. Tremayne knew that the Hessian’s injuries were worse than he was letting on.

Tremayne himself had been weak and dizzy but able to walk with the assistance of Bachmann, under heavy guard.

Carl had told him the casualties were high. He had seen the devastation for himself inside the extension, the bodies of the Grenadiers hanging limp in the abatis like scarecrows, but he was not prepared for the sight that met him outside the walls. The Mirbach Regiment had attacked the front gate, and also had been slaughtered. Bodies were heaped in the ditch, and the smell of blood and excrement was choking. It was almost impossible to believe that beyond this carnage lay the fragrant forest they had marched through the day before, and that across the river, smelling of oranges and cinnamon, was Kate.

But that wasn’t quite right either. When he closed his eyes and thought of her, it was of her wrist in his grasp, powdered and scented, at the foot of the stairs in Howe’s Germantown mansion. Or of her skirts bunched in his fists in that closet, or her head pillowed against his chest as he carried her out of the house where André had tried to poison her. But she was not warm and safe and scented now. She was likely suffering just as much as he was, recovering from the opium, and the lengths to which her body had gone to expel it.

Ann Whitall’s house was not soft and feminine and scented. It smelled of blood and sulfur ointments and the herbal taint of home remedies and backwoods doctoring. And godliness. The woman was a Quaker matron of the old school. She spoke in “thees” and “thous,” as only the sternest Friends still did. Tremayne could not place her age. She might have been anywhere between fifty and seventy. The simplicity of her dress mimicked the simplicity of her home, which was clean, sparsely furnished, and organized around seasonal work.

On their first morning in her house, which was filled with the dead and dying, most of whom were not afforded the privacy Donop and Tremayne shared in the parlor, she subjected both men to an herbal draught that if nothing else, obliterated their sense of smell for the next several hours. She proceeded to read the Bible to Donop for forty minutes. Her preference was for Revelation, and the blood and thunder of the Second Coming.

The French engineer, Du Plessis-Mauduit, turned out to be much younger than Tremayne had expected. Twenty-five, handsome, and wearing, with some affectation, American homespun, he visited with them for several hours. They conversed in French, and strove to outdo one another with courtesy. Tremayne complimented Du Plessis-Mauduit on his resourceful defenses, Du Plessis-Mauduit complimented Donop on his brave attack, and Donop thanked Du Plessis-Mauduit for rescuing him from the ditch where he lay most of the night on his shattered leg. It was the politeness with which the fighting men of Europe papered over the brutality and misery of their calling.

They were joined by Colonel Greene, who brought tea and brandy and sat stiffly while Tremayne translated his inquiries into Donop’s well-being, and received, with clear discomfort, the Hessian’s compliments on his gallant defense of the fort.

When the interview was concluded, Tremayne followed Greene into the kitchen garden to smoke a pipe of tobacco. The scent of rosemary and mint masked the smell of death here, and with the river sparkling behind them it was almost possible to forget for a moment the carnage that lay on the other side of Ann Whitall’s house.

“Will he live?” Tremayne asked. “Your surgeon will not say.”

Tremayne had thought at first that Greene was older than himself, but out in the light, he decided that Greene was only in his early thirties. Command, which Donop wore so naturally, lay heavily on this man.

“You have my permission to stay with him in the house,” Greene said. His evasion of Tremayne’s question spoke for itself.

“That is very good of you. But I cannot give you my parole.” Whatever honor he had left seemed to require such frankness. Tremayne knew that no matter what Kate’s danger, he could not leave Donop while the man lay dying here among strangers, but afterwards…

Greene snorted. “Run and you’ll be shot. It’s as simple as that. I don’t want your parole. It’s a damned stupid practice. I’m not giving you the run of my garrison because you’re lord of something or other, and you give me your word you won’t attempt to escape.”

“You surprise me, sir. Your care for the count has been exemplary. I took you for a man who observed the niceties of civilized warfare.”

“There is nothing civilized about war. I cannot afford to offend the Frenchman. He insisted on bringing both you and the count into the fort. Donop is crippled. You are another matter entirely. You’ve seen the strength of my garrison, the condition of my walls, the size and number of my guns up close. You pose a threat to us. I don’t like to shoot a man in cold blood, but I can’t waste a man guarding you. If the count dies, you’ll be locked in the empty magazine until I can figure out what to do with you.”