Bunker Hill Page 9

  Clinton nodded.

  “I would like an audible reply!” Howe snapped.

  “Yes, Sir William. I understand.”

  “Good.”

  Very tentatively, Clinton responded, “May I simply say, that as you propose this, it cannot be sub rosa.”

  “I don’t give a bloody fuck,” Howe said flatly. “And damn it to hell, will you sit down and stop standing there like some bleeding schoolmaster.”

  Sir Henry seated himself. “It will be an incredible scandal.”

  “I suppose it will.”

  “Not only here but in England and in Europe.”

  “Yes, but I don’t choose to discuss that, Sir Henry. I wish to discuss the lady’s husband, Mr. Joshua Loring. Have you met him?”

  “Oh yes. He’s been ass licking around for a commission.”

  “I gather he’s queer.”

  “He makes no secret of it,” Clinton said. “He married her to give himself some probity in the Tory crowd.”

  “What is he like?”

  “Despicable.”

  “I want you to talk to him. Be open. Tell him exactly what I have told you. His wife will live with me. He is not to open his mouth concerning that, and if I hear a tittle of gossip or complaint, I will cut his balls off, that is, considering he has any.”

  “What do we give him?” Clinton wondered.

  “He wants to be a captain in the grenadiers.”

  “Oh, does he? And how long would the officers in the grenadiers put up with him?”

  “Not very long, sir.” Howe began to chuckle, and Clinton waited patiently to share his humor.

  “How many rebel prisoners do we have, Sir Henry?”

  “I don’t have an exact count. Not many.”

  “And what do we do with them?” Howe asked.

  “Do with them? Well, damned if I know what to do with them!”

  “Where are they?”

  “We put them in Boston jail. Where else?”

  “Who’s in charge?”

  “No one. Just a few guards.”

  “Well, by God, we’ll soon have many more. Give our friend, Mr. Joshua Loring, the commission he wants so badly. Make him Captain Joshua Loring, and give him a command over the rebel prisoners. Find a dozen louts that you want to rid of and make them his brigade.”

  Clinton hesitated before replying, and then he shook his head uneasily. “These are prisoners of war, Sir William. They should be in the charge of a gentleman.”

  “These are stinking rebels, and they are no more prisoners of war than any footpad or highwayman at home. Captain Joshua Loring, in charge of His Majesty’s prisoners. Does he hate the rebels?”

  “Oh, that he does, and with a vengeance. They stripped him clean.”

  “Good,” General Howe said. “I know his kind. Give him a little power over another and he’ll be a happy man.”

  Evan Feversham was troubled that Dr. Benjamin Church had absented himself from the gathering of doctors and leeches. When he raised the matter with Dr. Warren, Warren was disposed to shake it off. “He’s an odd lot, Dr. Benjamin Church,” he said, not willing to go into details and explain to Feversham that when he, Warren, had raised the matter of the impending battle with Church, the little man had fumed with anger and denounced Feversham as a damned papist and Englishman, with whom he desired no further intercourse. Warren had heard the tale of the misdiagnosed smallpox incident and of Feversham’s rescue of Church from the angry crowd, and he thought it best to let the business rest.

  “Still and all,” Feversham argued, “he’s a member of the Committee of Safety. He’s an established physician, and we are in desperate need. If he nurses a grudge against me, I’ll try to talk him out of it.”

  “And if you do,” Warren said without enthusiasm, “you’ll never get him up there on the hills.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “He’s with the Middlesex men, over by Willis Creek. He has a tent there, and he dispenses.”

  “Really? What does he dispense?”

  “Poultices. He has a leech who bleeds for a shilling. It’s not a business I care for.”

  “Those fourteen men,” Feversham said, shaking his head. “Surely we could find a dozen more. Good heavens, there must have been a dozen doctors in Boston town alone.”

  “And they’re still there,” Warren agreed. “Tending the British, who pay in real coin.”

  It was about two miles to where the Massachusetts farmers had encamped at Willis Creek. Feversham walked his horse through as noisy and disorganized a crowd of men as he had ever seen. Officers, many of them self-appointed, shouted orders, trying to form their men in ranks. Still other units were on the move, more or less orderly, marching three abreast. There were town militias from as far away as Pennsylvania, units that numbered anywhere from a dozen to a hundred men, a variety of uniforms as colorful as they were improbable, small brigades, large brigades, either carrying banners or calling out their origin—Albany, Stamford, Marblehead, Basking Ridge, Bridgeport, Providence, Fall River, Cape Cod, New London, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, Newport, New Haven, Milford, Springfield. There was even a company of two hundred riflemen from Virginia, smart and romantic with their six-foot-long rifles, their doeskin leggings, and their fringed smocks. The uniforms were as colorful and different as the sewing circles in a hundred different villages could devise—red coats with white facings, blue coats with red facings, green coats, yellow coats, brown coats, pink coats, and shirts and vests and sashes in all the colors of the rainbow.

  On the day before, the great army of thirteen or fourteen or fifteen thousand men had been sprawled all over the circumference of Boston. No count was valid, and no one actually knew how many they were, and it seemed incredible to Feversham that now they were at least somewhat organized and on the march to a great battle. Here and there were mounted units of twelve or twenty or thirty men, never many more than that, but in wonderful fettle, one unit with metal cuirasses and lances and feathered helms, making their horses prance and rear to the hoots and jibes of the men on foot. And in and among them, women and children, the children strutting with sticks of wood, and in front of every house along the way, the women and children of the house whistling and cheering.

  Feversham had tended the wounded in three battles on the Continent, European wars, where the men stood against each other in solid ranks, and he had watched men die like pigs in a slaughterhouse. These men were ebullient. They knew of war only what they had seen or heard of the long, stretched-out battle of Concord, where each man was an army unto himself, where he could pot away at the retreating British soldiers from behind a stone wall or from the shelter of a tree or a barn or a house. War was like a turkey shoot, and as long as one kept his head down, he could come to no harm. And here he was with sixteen doctors, including himself and Joseph Warren, who was walking his horse to participate in eternity. He was too old for this. He was too far from home, and these men were as strange to him as men on the moon, if indeed there were men on the moon. He was a Catholic and fallen beyond redemption. He had married a lovely woman in Ridgefield in Connecticut, and he had left her to be a part of this madness for reasons beyond his understanding. He was not good at understanding himself.

  It was a hot June day. Feversham saw a girl standing in the doorway. She had a pitcher in one hand, a mug in the other, and poured water into the mug for a thirsty young fellow to drink. She had hair as yellow as corn silk, and her firm breasts were bursting from her bodice. Her blue eyes fixed on him, and he pulled up his horse, his body seized suddenly with desire so strong it weakened him.

  She took the mug back, poured water, and cried out to him, “Here, Captain, wet your throat.”

  He had no sense of himself as a good-looking man, his long, dark face bringing him no comfort when he regarded it in a mirror. He had his Welsh mother’s brown eyes, her black hair, now streaked through with gray. But he cut a fine figure on his horse, with his black boots and doeskin breeches a
nd loose white shirt. The girl handed him the mug, watching him with pleasure as he drank.

  “More, Captain?”

  “Oh, no. Thank you.” He found himself smiling at her. What a blessing to find something to smile at. He leaned down to hand back the mug, asking her, “Why do you call me captain, lass?”

  “The officers ride, sir. The common men walk.”

  “I’m a common man, but I am a doctor, which earns me a horse.”

  “And what a strange way of speech you have, Captain!”

  “I’m English.”

  “Ah, so you are. And why are you not over there with the lobsters?”

  “I would find no such beauty as you over there with the lobsters.”

  “Come inside out of the heat,” she said. “The war will wait.”

  He was almost sick with desire. Cursing himself, he rode on without looking back, the foot soldiers passing by, grinning and hooting and offering themselves as substitutes. As so often, he wondered what strange forces drove him that he should be here of his own will, among these alien bumpkins who lived cheek by jowl with their angry Protestant God and were making this bloody war out of slights that English commoners had endured for centuries without protest.

  A cluster of tents caught his eye, and he turned his horse toward them, enduring the curses and shouts of a column of marching men that had to give way for him. In front of one oversized brown tent, a man on a horse was shouting a stream of profanities at a small, fat man, whom Feversham recognized as Dr. Church. The man on the horse he knew slightly, Israel Putnam by name, whom he had met and spoken with two days ago. Putnam was an older man, almost sixty, a farmer from Pomfret in Connecticut and given to fits of anger. A handful of men stood around, listening to the exchange between Church and Putnam, and as Feversham came on the scene, Putnam was shouting, “I do not give a tinker’s fart for your damned headaches, Dr. Church. This whole lousy day is a headache. Joe Warren tells me he called for all doctors to be assigned, and you refused.”

  “I am unwell,” Church protested. “I have the runs. I am here at my tent, and I will do my duty here. I will not be spoken to like some common lout. I am a member of the Committee of Safety.”

  “You could be a member of the angel’s chorus, for all that I give a damn. Your place is up on the hills, and you will set up a surgery there or I’ll burn this fuckin’ tent down on your head!” He paused for breath and saw Feversham. “On the same mission, Dr. Feversham?”

  Feversham nodded.

  “He’ll be there,” Putnam said, spurring his horse away and waving an arm for Feversham to follow him. Feversham was intrigued by the short, stocky, grizzled man, half bald with what remained of his hair flowing down in long white locks over his shoulders. In spite of the heat, he wore heavy leather trousers, knit stockings, and old shoes. He carried two horse pistols and over the pommel, hanging from a chain loop, an enormous cutlass. Though his shirt was drenched with perspiration, he wore a leather waistcoat and, on his head, a broad-brimmed farmer’s hat.

  “Come up alongside of me,” he shouted to Feversham, and when they were side by side, he said to the English doctor, “I’m for the hills. Will you ride with me?”

  Feversham pulled up alongside of Putnam, who said, “That man is no damn good. It was in my mind to tie a rope around his neck and drag him over to the peninsula. As much as anyone, I’m in command of this army, and I had to come here myself to talk to that little bastard. He’s a big muckamuck on the damned Committee of Safety, and no one will touch him. The committee holds a meeting, and two hours later, the British know every word spoken. As sure as there’s a God in heaven, it comes from Church. What kind of spell he has over them, I don’t know.”

  “Do you have any evidence?” Feversham wondered.

  Putnam shrugged and shook his head. “Devil take him! We have other fish to fry. Warren tells me you fought in Europe? Why are you with us?”

  “I’m Catholic. They took all that our family had, all that my grandfather had. But that’s a small thing. I had a bellyful of them and a land where a poor bastard is hanged by the neck for stealing a loaf of bread. The crux of it came when I served the wounds of a French soldier. They cashiered me. I came to America.”

  “We’re going to defend both hills, Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill. Gridley insists that the whole defense hangs on a redoubt. I don’t agree with him, but I’m going along. Have you ever seen a proper redoubt?”

  “I’m a surgeon, not a soldier or an engineer.”

  “Warren says you have brains and eyes in your head.”

  They were now at the Charlestown Neck, the sliver of land that connected Charlestown peninsula with the mainland. The road was crowded with Continental troops marching across the neck toward the two high points that dominated the peninsula. Putnam waved at two men who sat their horses alongside the road. Feversham recognized Dr. Warren and Artemus Ward, and remembering the order of battle he had seen in Europe—the marvelously disciplined French and Prussian and British troops, the lines of attack and defense, of movement and countermovement, the rush of musket fire like eruptions from the mouth of hell—he couldn’t help thinking that this was a tragicomic opera, a disaster on its way to happen, the half-disciplined files of farmers and clerks and hunters and woodcutters, the confusion, the babble of voices. Next to him rode the tactical commander of the whole movement, who had taken time to seek out a fat little doctor, suspected of being the enemy’s master spy, and over on the other side of the causeway there was an elderly man ridden with the pain of kidney stones and a gentle doctor who was running a fever and ought to be in bed.

  They pushed through to join Warren and Ward, Putnam explaining that he had run into Feversham and had brought him along. Putnam asked about the redoubt.

  “The redoubt? I’m not sure that we ought to build a redoubt,” Ward said. “Suppose they attack immediately?”

  “My men are on Bunker Hill,” Putnam said. “Prescott is there with his men. I’m going to move Nutting’s brigade through Charlestown to the shoreline.” He pointed to the ridge that connected the two hills, Breed’s Hill and Bunker Hill, the slope to the ridge spotted with men climbing to take their position across the ridge toward Breed’s Hill. “They’re Prescott’s men,” he said.

  “Where’s Prescott?” Ward demanded. “I don’t see him.”

  To Feversham, they looked like an aimless mob, without direction or leadership. Why the British did not attack immediately was beyond his understanding. There were no more than a few hundred men in Nutting’s brigade. “How many? With Nutting?” he asked Putnam.

  “Two hundred.” The houses of Charlestown obscured the view.

  “There’s at least a mile of shoreline,” Feversham said, and then bit his lips. It was actually none of his damn business even to question them.

  “We’ll reinforce them,” Putnam said shortly.

  “Feversham,” Warren said, “would you go up there to the top of the hill? I told Gridley that you have seen redoubts in action.”

  “I’m not equipped to interfere,” Feversham said.

  “Goddamn it, sir!” Putnam snarled. “Do what you’re ordered to do!”

  His abrupt change of mood startled Feversham. Without another word, Putnam spurred his horse down the road toward Bunker Hill.

  Artemus Ward shook his head anxiously. “That’s the way he is,” Warren said. “At least he has the make of a commander. Even if he doesn’t know what to do, he does it.”

  Feversham nodded, shook his reins, and rode off on a path across a meadow toward Breed’s Hill. He dismounted to lead his horse up the slope, passing by a division of about sixty men, stripped to the waist, dragging four pieces of artillery up the hill. They had three horses to help with the struggle, and when they saw Feversham, they began to shout, “Lend us your horse, Captain!” Evidently, captain was the proper address for anyone astride a horse.

  Feversham grinned and passed them by, thinking that if they were British, no questions would be
asked; the horse would simply have been appropriated. As the slope lessened, he mounted again and rode to where men were digging earnestly, looking around until he located Gridley, who was squatting over a large sheet of paper that rested on a flat stone.

  From their position, Feversham had a view of the whole harbor, with Charlestown just below at the base of the peninsula and Boston town across the peninsula, and in the Charles River and off Hudson’s Point, five British warships. The sight made his heart sink as he measured the chaos he had just passed through against the mighty force of the British fleet.

  He dismounted, and Gridley glanced up to greet him. Col. Richard Gridley was a big man, wide and strong and well over six feet in height, with reddish hair, a two-day growth of blond beard, and tired, bloodshot blue eyes. He squinted at Feversham for a

  moment then nodded. “Feversham. Right?”

  Feversham nodded.

  “Warren said you’d be coming by.” He called to one of the diggers, “Lenny, get over here and take the doctor’s horse.”

  Feversham gave up the reins and bent over the sheet of paper on the stone. Gridley had sketched out the shape of a redoubt in charcoal. “Look at this, Doctor. I swear I don’t know what the devil I’m doing. I saw redoubts when we took Quebec during the French war, but they were built of stone and concrete. We have fieldstone and common soil, but how on God’s earth I can build a proper fortification out of that, I don’t know. If we pile up earth walls, the British cannon will blow it to pieces. We could dig trenches, I suppose, but Warren insists on a redoubt. How do they do it in the old country? Warren says you’ve seen European battlefields.”

  “Some, yes.”

  “And redoubts?”

  “I’ve been trying to remember.”

  “The thing is, what holds the walls together.”