To Try Men's Souls - George Washington 1 (32 page)

He felt overwhelmed. There was no escape. Woodenly he watched as Michael stepped closer, half concealing a porcelain bowl. Rush already had hold of his arm, pressing up a dark blue vein, just below the inside of his elbow, thumb pressing above the vein, causing it to swell and distend.

“Ah, now, that’s a good one.”

With a deft swift motion, so fast that Tom barely had time to react, Rush pushed the lancet box down hard against Tom’s arm and flicked the release button on the side.

Tom flinched, but it was too late, Rush had him in a firm grip. The half dozen spring driven blades slashed down, cutting into his arm, opening the vein and then snicked back into the brass box.

Rush withdrew the torture device from Tom’s arm. Already a rivulet of blood was welling up.

“There! See!” Rush exclaimed proudly. “Dark, slow-flowing, thick, and discolored, exactly my diagnosis.”

“Michael.”

His servant, sitting down by Tom’s arm, took hold with strong calloused hands, turning the arm so that the blood, running thick and slow, dripped into the porcelain bowl.

“A good cut, sir,” Michael exclaimed.

“Of course.” Rush held the lancet box up for Thomas to see. “Finest instrument, imported from Germany. They make exceptional scientific instruments there, those Germans. Cost me six guineas, but worth it. No more clumsy stabbing with a scalpel that makes a mess of things. Good clean cuts from half a dozen blades that flash out like lightning, cut and withdraw until next time. Very fine workmanship.”

Rush held it up proudly, examining it as if it was a treasured jewel.

“You know what I say to it,” Paine retorted angrily.

“My friend, once this war is over and I am back to my regular profession, a new medicine will flourish here in America, free of the superstitions of the old world, and, I tell you, in our lifetimes we will see the banishment of most diseases. Instruments such as these . . .”

Rush put the mechanical lancet on the tray and patted Tom on the shoulder.

“Let’s see now.”

The porcelain cup was already half full with several ounces of blood. Rush took a second cup from the tray, deftly put it under the first that Michael was still holding and transferred them. Holding the first cup up, he sniffed it; using his silver probe he stirred the blood, then held the probe up and peered closely as droplets of blood fell away into the bowl. He stuck his fingers into the liquid, withdrew them, and rubbed his bloody fingers together, and to Tom’s disbelief tasted it.

“Exactly as I expected,” he announced cheerfully.

“Your humors are indeed out of balance. The blood is thick, dark, and filled with bile, which we all know is poisonous.”

“Of course,” Tom replied sarcastically.

“Michael, twelve ounces.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In Europe, most still hold that bleeding is the realm of the barber surgeon. But those prejudices are dying in this new world of ours. The doctor takes no shame in being the surgeon. If time permitted and you let me purge, I’d use some leeches as well. At your nodes, on your neck, under your arms and groin. They would do the trick. That and some cupping on your back. Just a day, Thomas, and you’ll feel like a new man.”

“No!” Tom snapped emphatically.

“Tom Paine, you are too valuable to all of us to take this lightly. You are on the edge of physical collapse from your humors, worms, and a clogged liver. We lose you and we lose much. You are worth your weight in gold to us at the moment.”

Tom said nothing, staring at Michael, who was squeezing and kneading his arm to draw out a continual flow of blood.

“Worth your weight in gold,” Rush said again.

Tom looked at him quizzically.

“I read the first chapter of your new work. It is safely in my office.”

Tom felt a flash of anger. It was not yet ready for others to read. It was a draft only, written in the field. He still wanted a few more days, now that he was here, to polish his thoughts, to rewrite freshly and cleanly so there would be no mistakes with the printers. It still needed work.

“How did you find it?”

Rush blushed slightly.

“You left it on the table in the parlor. Michael here saw it, and placed it where I could read it. I pray you do not object.”

Tom thought about the breach of etiquette and then shook his head. When he first came to these shores Dr. Rush was the man who had personally ordered him taken off the ship anchored out in the harbor, crew and passengers dying of the typhoid. This was the man, who, based solely on one letter from Benjamin Franklin, had opened his house, given him comfort, and literally saved his life. He could begrudge him nothing . . . not even this intrusion into his work.

“Michael will finish your bleeding,” Rush announced. “I have more than a few letters to write in the meantime. Congress, as you must know, has fled.”

“I saw that when I arrived in town.”

“Michael will finish your treatment,” and he looked over at his servant. “I would prefer a full sixteen ounces but if you can coax out twelve, that will be sufficient for today.”

Michael nodded, not replying, attention focused on the steady flow of blood from Paine’s arm.

“Once done here, Michael will help you dress, then Emily will set out breakfast for you. There is much to talk about, Tom Paine.”

Rush patted him on the shoulder.

“In an hour, with those humors at least partially driven out, you will feel like a new man.”

Rush left the room.

“Just a bit more, sir,” Michael announced.

“Take your time,” Paine replied, the sarcasm in his voice obvious. He could not help but recall the leeches who had attended his first wife, draining every shilling he had as they bled her and bled her again, and still she had died.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Michael.”

“I read your words.”

“And?”

“Well, sir,” and beneath his dusky complexion Thomas could see the man redden.

“I only wish I could hoist a musket after reading that.”

“You read, Michael?”

“Of course, sir,” Michael replied, a tone of pride in his voice. “I was born in Barbados. My mistress, she married a man from Maryland, and I and my wife were brought here along with her. She died along with her first baby. Guess us being around was too much a reminder, and her husband freed us, said it was his wife’s dying wish. I came here and Dr. Rush gave me a job. Local Quaker folk taught me to read, and the doctor, well, he made me his assistant for things like this.”

Michael nodded down to Tom’s arm, which he still held tightly, rubbing the vein with his thumbs, helping to push the blood out.

Thomas looked down at the stream of blood dripping from his arm.

“May I ask a question, sir?”

“Anything, Michael.”

“Those words. Do they apply to me as well?”

“What?”

“All the words I’ve been hearing, about us being created equal and what you wrote. General George Washington himself sat in this house more than once last year talking of such things, while his slave sat in the kitchen with me, listening through the open door. Do such things mean all men, or just some men?”

Thomas gazed at him, unable to reply. He had seen the occasional black man in London but never actually spoken to one until he took ship to America. Until then they were an abstract concept, defined in his mind as sufferers in this world the same as he and so many others who suffered under the rule of kings and those born to aristocracy.

Here in America, though? The city teemed with them, some slaves, some free. When the armies came up from the South and passed through the city on the way to the war, many in the ranks were black men, or men who looked to have some African blood, some obviously servants, more than a few, though, with muskets on their shoulders. Others labored at the docks, in the taverns, again some slaves, others free men.

He did not know how to answer. All logic told him that this man who was holding his arm would bleed the same as he; Michael breathed air, loved, hated, dreamed, and would die the same as he. But equal as well? It was fine for them to stand on the volley line, to lean their backs into moving artillery, to cook what little food the army had, but did that mean they were equal?

He did not know what to say. He knew what was in his heart, but in this strange country of thirteen different nations, some were more than emphatic that slavery would always exist here and to press otherwise would cause the alliance to shatter.

“Your wife?” Thomas asked, now uncomfortable.

“Dead.”

Michael said the word coldly, clearly to cut the conversation short, a subject he did not wish to take further.

There was a long uneasy silence between the two as Michael
kneaded his arm. The cup was now filled, and he nodded. “That should do it.”

He put the cup on the tray and bound Tom’s arm tight.

“Now, sir, let’s get you dressed.”

The tone of minutes before, of two men talking, was gone. Michael was again the servant, kneeling to help Tom put on his breeches, hose, shoes. Bracing him when Tom first stood up and felt for a moment as if he were going to faint.

Jacket on, Michael brushed him down and stepped back.

“Now, sir, you look a gentleman again.”

Tom shot him a cold glance.

“Gentleman be damned, but at least I feel warm.”

Michael stepped back and opened the door.

“I believe the doctor awaits you for breakfast, sir.”

“Michael, my name is Thomas.”

Michael did not reply.

“Michael, I am sorry. I did not know how to answer you,” he paused. “Yet. In a way I was a slave, too.”

“I know that. But no one could ever guess that now.” Michael fell silent and turned slightly to look at the mirror.

The action struck Thomas like a bolt. I can be cleaned up, shaved, clothed in new broadcloth and look a gentleman. No matter what this man does in his life, others just merely need to see his color, as he himself now saw it as he gazed into the mirror.

Michael led the way downstairs into the dining room. Rush was at the end of the table, leaning back in his chair, documents piled high. He was holding one up so that the morning light shone on it, gazing intently until Tom approached.

Sighing, Rush tossed the document on the pile.

“Somehow it was easier when it was all just talk in the taverns,” Rush sighed. “Now this! Paper and more paper. Bills, appeals, pleas for office, claims and counterclaims.”

He pushed the pile back. “Damn them all.” He motioned for Tom to sit by his side.

Even as Tom sat, the door into the kitchen opened and a serving girl came out carrying a tray with steaming coffee, followed by another bearing plates weighed down with thin slices of fried ham, and, of all things, omelets, actual omelets from eggs, stuffed with mushrooms, thin slices of bacon, and even chopped green peppers.

The sight of it almost made Tom weep. His thoughts flashed back to the night in Newark, to the boy who had brought in a couple of greasy carp, and how all had drooled in anticipation as the fish was divided, each man getting a piece. He had been grateful to receive the head.

Strangely, his stomach rebelled at the sight and scent of the food; the room too confining and warm after months in the field. He felt light-headed, nauseous.

“It will pass,” Rush announced, leaning over, taking Tom’s wrist and feeling for his pulse. “The humors of your body are readjusting after the bleeding. Now eat slowly and you will feel better.”

Tom did as ordered, the two eating in silence while Rush returned to scanning the papers beside his plate. Meal finished, he personally refilled Thomas’s cup with coffee.

“Now tell me all,” Rush announced. “Start with the day you left here.”

Thomas sat back, staring off, sipping his coffee, recounting what he had seen. The high hopes of late summer, then defeat after defeat and his regiment disintegrating and finally just running off. Wandering northward to fall in with General Greene. The debacles he had witnessed, the nightmare of the retreat across Jersey and then, finally, back to Philadelphia.

The clock in the parlor chimed through two hours as he spoke, Rush asking pointed questions at times.

Several times he focused on Washington. Did he make a mistake in his deployment along the Palisades of New Jersey? Why had they been given up without a fight? How did the men in the ranks feel about him? Then finally to General Charles Lee.

“More than a few say Lee is a pissant,” Tom replied. “Rumor has
it that he is loitering in the north, waiting for Washington to be crushed so he can take command.”

“He won’t now,” and Rush pointed to the pile of paperwork. “A dispatch has come in that Lee was captured early this morning.”

“And his army? Thomas exclaimed. “Good God, that’s several thousand men.”

“Oh, they are well. Lee decided to bed down in some tavern miles away from the army and was surprised and captured by a British patrol. So he is no longer in the fight.”

“Fine with me,” Thomas replied. “In fact, I think his removal will improve our chances of winning. He was a troublemaker and a conspirator who wanted General Washington to fail. Without him we can focus on the British and not worry so much about plots in our own lines.”

Rush said nothing for a moment.

“I’ve been asked by Congress to stay on here, to be a liaison to the army. I’m to observe and report.”

“Craven of them to run like that,” Thomas snapped.

Rush smiled. “I don’t think it appropriate to reply to you about that, Thomas Paine. Heaven knows what you might write next.”

“A free press, isn’t it?”

“If we can find anyone to print you.”

“I tried McKinney. He threatened to burn it.”

“Half this town is just waiting to hang out the Union Jack. Every day there are rumors that Cornwallis will be across the river or Howe will sail up the Delaware. And if that is true, my friend, we’d better pack quickly, for we are on their list. When you passed through Princeton, did you happen to see my father-in-law?”

“Who, sir?”

“My wife’s father. Witherspoon. His mansion is just outside of the village.”

“I don’t recall.”