Washington and Caesar

3

Great Dismal Swamp, September 1775

Caesar peered through the fringe of magnolia at the arm of open water stretching north from their new camp.

“Where’s Virgil?”

“Don’ know.” Old Ben looked shifty when he said it, and he probably did know. Something was going on; all the men smiled when they looked at Virgil or tried to cover his absences. Caesar shook his head, and rose carefully to his feet, the fowler crooked in his arm.

“What are you all smiling at?” he said to the other men. “Come on. I’m gon’ teach you to use this gun.”

It was by no means the first attempt, and Virgil and Old Ben had at least passed the stage where the guns scared them, but Caesar was determined that they would all learn to use the fowler well, even the boy. In a corner of his mind, he had considered trying to hit the militia for more muskets; if he had one for every man, and they could shoot, he would have a force to be reckoned with in the swamp. The militia was wary, and hadn’t come as deep in after the first foray, as if by the killing of one slave they had justified themselves and could go home.

He led them, single file, well away from their camp to a sun-drenched clearing in the high tree cover. Some time back, a storm had knocked two big trees down, and their huge, dirt-clogged roots made pyramids at either end of a clearing long enough to run a horse.

Two men lit pipes and sat down, and the rest stood in a loose knot. Caesar wondered idly where the tobacco came from; he suspected it was of a piece with Virgil’s forays, but only today did it strike him that the tobacco smelled fresh. He also wondered if he should have a man out watching the trail from the settlements. That would have been Virgil’s job.

“Everyone look at this gun,” he began. “This is the butt, where you place her against yo’ shoulder. Not yo’ chest. Not yo’ arm. Like this.” He suited word to deed and tucked the fowler into his shoulder. He was quite familiar with it now, having fired it more times than he could count and killed any number of birds and several deer. He still preferred to get right up close to them, though.

“This is the lock. She make the gun fire, and she mus’ be dry an’ clean all the time. This part, with the flint, be called the cock.”

He looked up. Several men were smiling. Long Tom had taken out his folding razor and begun whittling at an old stick.

“Bigger ‘an yours is, Lolly,” Long Tom said.

Caesar rolled his eyes with the earnestness of the young and plowed on.

“The cock holds the flint. She strikes against the hammer, like this.” He pulled the trigger so that the flint in the jaws of the cock struck the hardened face of the hammer and made sparks. “Them sparks fall in the pan, heah…here, and touch off that powder.”

He took the small horn out of the pouch that had come with the gun, a tiny thing that barely filled his hand. He twisted the stopper out with his teeth and tapped the lip of the small horn against the pan of the lock until he had filled it with powder. Then he shut the hammer so that its “L” shape covered the pan, drew back the cock past half cock to full cock, and pulled the trigger. The cock flashed forward, struck the hammer, and snapped it back from the pan while making a shower of sparks that fell into the exposed pan. The priming powder went up with a small whoosh and a finger of smoke that trailed away over Caesar’s shoulder.

He held the priming horn and the fowler out to Jim, the youngest.

“You try, Jim.”

Jim set his face in a look of concentration made a little comical by the fact that throughout the operation his mouth opened and shut slowly like a fish under water. He balanced the long weapon in his hand and found it lighter than he had expected. Then he pulled back the cock as Caesar had told them and took the stopper out of the little horn and tapped powder. It took him a long time to get the right amount of powder, much longer than it had taken Caesar, and his careful attention was almost spoiled when he saw the mermaid carved generously into the little horn. Then he shut the hammer on the pan, raised the fowler to his shoulder, and tugged at the trigger, turning his face away from the expected flash of the priming. Nothing happened.

Caesar hit him lightly on the shoulder.

“Nevah turn yo’ face away.” He scowled for a moment. “Never turn your face away.”

Jim forced his head down over the fowler’s barrel, and pulled at the trigger again. The whole barrel moved, but nothing happened.

“You’re still on half cock,” said Caesar, indicating the lock.

“He still only got a half cock!” called Lolly, laughing.

Caesar glared at the man, and the laughter died slowly.

He knew he wasn’t old enough to give them orders, but none of them seemed to want to be in charge; they all simply wanted to make his life hard for trying to give orders. Joking when he was talking was common; if he fought it all the time, it just made things worse. Usually he laughed with them. Today, he wanted them to learn.

Jim pulled at the cock, and it came back far more easily than he had expected, clicking home into the full cock position with a small and sinister noise. Jim was afraid of the gun, and more afraid now that it was full of potential to fire; the cock looked ready to leap at the hammer with the smallest provocation. He was very hesitant when he pointed the piece; he jerked the barrel several inches when he pulled the trigger. But the pan flashed, and it didn’t burn him, and he felt a glow of satisfaction.

“You has to keep the barrel pointed at yo’ target. No pulling it. Like this.” Caesar aimed over the barrel and pulled the trigger, and the barrel stayed steady. Jim watched.

“When you can flash the pan without twitchin’, I expec’ I’ll give you powder an’ shot.” He smiled at Jim, then at the rest of the men.

“Jim can do it, I expec’ the res’ of you have no trouble at all.” Caesar held the fowler out like a dare. “Who wants to try next? No one wan’ to step forwar’?” He looked at them all. They weren’t scared; it was just that years of slavery had eliminated any tendency to volunteer. He looked at Lolly, the joker, sitting on a downed giant and puffing at the blackened stump of a clay pipe.

“Lolly. You try. Here.” He handed Lolly the fowler, and Lolly shrank away until he felt its sleek wood and the lightness of the thing, and then he held it with an almost proprietary air. Jim handed him the little priming horn, and Lolly smiled at him.

“There’s somethin’ I haven’ seen none of in a whiles!” laughed Lolly, looking at the horn and the mermaid’s breasts.

“I tink Virgil be lookin’ at dat now,” murmured Tom, normally a silent man.

Lolly was determined to excel, and he thumbed back the cock, pulled the stopper off the horn with his teeth, and primed the piece in seconds, then shut the hammer on the pan and pushed the stopper back into the horn and tossed it to Jim. Then he raised the fowler to his shoulder, seating it firmly where the muscles of the arm and shoulder knit together. The fowler looked tiny in his hands.

He pointed the fowler squarely at Caesar and pulled the trigger. The pan flashed, but no one laughed with him.

Caesar didn’t glare. He took the gun away from Lolly and looked away for a moment.

“Don’ never do that. Not even in fun. Man don’ know whether it be loaded or not. If’n the pan flash, man might turn some pair of breeches brown.” He said it all with such solemnity that it took them a moment to realize that he had made a joke of it. While they laughed, Lolly leaned over to him and hit him on the arm.

“Didn’ mean nothin, Cese.” He looked sheepish, as he always did when a joke went wrong or no one laughed with him.

“No harm done, Lolly.” Any rancor Caesar might have felt was expelled by the man’s obvious competence. Joking or not, he had watched and learned.

Next it was Old Ben’s turn; although he had fired the gun before, he wanted the practice. Caesar gave him a ball and enough powder to drive it; Ben had earned a real shot. He put powder in the pan, spun the musket in his hands and put powder in the barrel and pushed a ball down atop it, seated on a little patch of oiled muskrat hide. He had to push hard on the ramrod to seat the ball, and he looked carefully at Caesar’s mark on the ramrod to make sure the ball was fully seated. Then he took careful aim at the billet of wood across the clearing and fired. He didn’t hit the wood, but sandy soil flew in the sun close to his point of aim, if a little short. The others cheered his shooting.

Caesar swayed a little as he recovered the musket. He coached Tom through the motions of loading, but he looked green and seemed to be struggling with his body to stay upright.

“You sick, Caesar?” asked Ben directly.

“Somethin’ I ate. I feel like somebody kicked me.”

“You get out o’ the sun, then, an’ don’ be foolish.” Ben took control of the gun and its associated pouch and began to move the whole party back toward their camp. By the time they reached it, Tom and Lolly had to carry Caesar.

She never closed her eyes, not when he was in her, not when he stroked her, not even when she crooned to him at the end of her passion. But those odd golden eyes looked at him with some intent, and he could lose himself in their light. When they were in the half-dark barn, those eyes seemed to have a slight glow, like the last of a sunset, and the first time he had loved her, he had put a hand in front of her eyes to see if they really cast some light. It was like that for him; she scared him a little.

At first he had thought that tremor of fear came from his long abstinence. It had been a year or more since he had been in a woman-any woman at all-and his wife, a fine woman, had never had the fire this one had, or the shape. But as he came back for her again and again, against his own judgment, he began to be afraid that she had taken something of his soul, or had bound him. He even wondered if it was all the power of her eyes.

The men at the camp knew he was with a woman. Jim had been quick to tell them about the first encounter and had probably watched the second. Caesar didn’t know; he lay on a pile of brush under a bower in the camp, and they had to carry him back and forth to empty himself. Virgil tried not to think that Caesar was probably dying. He lost himself in her eyes again and reached beneath her to slip his hands under her and raise her body into his strokes. She liked to be touched constantly when he was in her, and pouted if he paid her too little mind, but she never talked. In fact, he didn’t know anything about her, except that the slave-takers owned her.

But just as he lost himself in the act again, that last thought burned through him, so that his whole body stiffened a little and she made a little grunting noise like a question. She was very good at reading him.

She belonged to the two slave-takers. He knew their names, now: Bludner and Weymes. And he wondered why two white men owned the most beautiful black woman near the swamp and didn’t use her.

It was his third time with her, and only now, at the brink of his own vast satisfaction, did he really wonder why she lay with him. It might have unmanned him completely-the icy hand of betrayal on his prick-but she opened her eyes wide, and her cunny gave a little pulse, as if grabbing him to her, and he was past his fear, and she seemed the only thing in the world. He pinched her nipples, hard, and held her face in his big hands, and they both spasmed together, beyond ecstasy for a moment. Then he didn’t know where she went; he went straight back to the fear of betrayal.

He rolled off her, stroking her with his left hand to keep her passive while he looked out of the long crack between the barn’s boards. He could see down into the yard. The old slave couple were willing conspirators, warning them when anyone approached the barn, but Virgil had known from the first that the old woman didn’t fancy young Sally one bit. Perhaps her man wanted Sally, old as he was. That would be no odd thing. Or perhaps Sally didn’t talk to the old couple any more than she talked to him. She was odd, a sort of magical creature, too handsome for the dirt and tangle of real life. Even now, as he watched for the two white men with the long guns and assumed that she had betrayed him, he wanted her.

“Them slave-takers comin’ fo’ me?” he asked, suddenly.

She turned her face a little away.

“Sally,” he started, and then couldn’t think of what to say. A profession of love didn’t seem appropriate; he lacked the will to threaten her. He turned her head to face him, and stared into those deep golden eyes that seemed guileless. “Sally, I need to know. Wheah ah they?”

“Don’ know.”

“Is they comin’ fo’ me?”

“They don’ wan’ you.” She turned on her side so that her heavy breasts rolled on to the straw, a movement that always caught his eye. She smiled when she saw how he watched her, even now.

“They know I’m heah?”

“They don’ wan’ you. They wan’ the otha’ man, the one killed all the white folk.”

“They know wheah he is?”

“They follow you, big man. An’ they wan’ follow you today, to be sho.”

He stopped stroking her. Somehow, she had said too much-enough to let him know how well she knew the slave-takers, how much of their plans she understood, how little she cared about him. He didn’t really expect her to resist them; it was too hard for a slave woman to resist a man, and he knew it too well. But there were other ways to rebel, and she wasn’t following them. He thought now that he could guess why the old woman disliked her. He pulled his breeches on and his shirt; he had laid the shirt under them to keep her off the scratchy old straw, and it smelled of her. She just watched him, naked. The first woman he had ever known for whom nakedness seemed to mean nothing, as if she preferred it to clothes. His wife had been much shyer.

“I won’ be back. You need to get clear of they two slave-takers, girl.”

“I may. Fat lot you know about me.” She wasn’t sullen, just direct, and again he wondered at how little he knew her. He still had one of their two pistols, and he checked the prime, stuck it in the back of his waistband. Then he jumped, caught a beam and swung to the hard-packed floor of the barn, avoiding the creak of the roped wooden ladder that let on to the little loft. He didn’t know where they were or how they were watching him; for all he knew, she was signaling them even now. That didn’t seem so bad, if he could get one of them before they got him, but he suspected they knew he was armed. He suspected they knew all about him. The barn had only one door and he slipped through it and into the tall weeds in seconds, expecting a rifle ball in the back as he moved, but there was no shot, no movement, no call for a chase. He began to breathe a little easier, and then he realized that there was no sound of voices anywhere; that the farmer and his old male slave were still in the field, but no one else seemed to be around. He had expected to find the boy, Jim, who waited for him every time. He wanted, suddenly, to know, and he looked for Jim in the brush at the edge of the clearing. Failing that, he moved as cautiously as he could into the brush pile behind the little windowless cabin where the two old slaves lived. He slipped up on the little cabin from the big cabin’s blind spot and scratched the door with a stick.

“Who theah?” called the old woman.

“Virgil,” he answered softly, going through the door.

“You best be off, boy.” She was cooking on her little mud hearth, making johnnycakes on a flat rock with some meat fat. They smelled delicious.

“You seen my Jim?”

“I seen more than Jim. Damn, all you young men is fools. They two men is followin’ yo’ Jim, and they’ll take him, an’ you too. All because you have to wet yo’ prick.”

Virgil felt his face get hot; it was like being admonished by his mother or aunt. But he could think quickly when it mattered, and he knew that the camp was in danger if Jim was running for it with the two whites on his trail.

“How long back did they start?”

“Half an hour. They took guns, boy. You bettah run.”

“I got a gun of my own, momma. You take care.”

“It’s that Sally, ain’t it, boy? She sets you up and they takes you?”

“She jus’ does what she has to, momma.” He couldn’t raise an anger for Sally; and the old woman really reminded him of his mother. Virgil found himself thinking about things he hadn’t troubled himself about since he came to the swamp. He shook his head as if to clear it of thoughts. He slipped out the door and back into the weeds, found Jim’s trail, and started to notice what he hadn’t seen before-clear sign of two big men in boots following the boy. He checked his prime again and set off at a run.

Up in the barn, Sally wiped herself with a bit of tow she kept to hand and then wiped her body with straw before she pulled her shift on, and then pulled her petticoats over her head and then over her breasts. She never liked taking a man in her clothes; it was so much nicer being naked. She wriggled a bit to settle the petticoat, and then pulled her strings taut and tied them off, and began to look for her pockets and her apron. The men who owned her didn’t care if she did a lick of work beyond what they kept her for, but she didn’t like to be called useless by a wise old woman like Old Sukey. She went down to the garden where Virgil had found her and got her hoe, humming a little in her throat.

Virgil ran and ran, slowing from time to time to listen to the swamp, or just to get his breath. After the third stop his breath was ragged and uneven, and he felt winded. He was in good shape, but the uneven diet told, and running in the swamp was as fatiguing to the mind-which had to make judgments every second-as it was to the body. He checked his priming again, tapped the powder back to the bottom of the pan, and moved off no faster than a quick walk. It was the best he could do.

Caesar squatted over his log, emptying himself into the pool of filth he had created over the last few days. It stank so badly that the other men went somewhere else. They were afraid of him, now-afraid of his fever and the death they all thought they saw on him. Sometimes, in the evening like this, he was pretty lucid; he could look around and see that he was not being chased through endless swamp by some nameless horror that had pursued him for days since the fever hit him. In the evening, the horror abated and he knew himself and the camp, although he was so weak he couldn’t raise his hands for water. And he seemed to want water all the time.

But the dream was still apparently with him tonight because he could hear Jim shouting something from the trail at the edge of the camp and then there was a shot. It wasn’t their fowler; it was a sharper bang, almost like a crack of lightning, and adrenaline put a little energy in his body, although it had taken the whole force of his will to drag his near-naked body from his pallet to this log.

Someone was screaming, and there was a second shot that cut off the scream like a knife cutting off the last squeals of a hog. Caesar threw himself forward and pulled his breeches up, trying in vain to button them and feeling filthy for not having wiped himself, but the unmistakable sound of a third shot, this one from the fowler, drove him on. He tried to crawl forward, but the effort was too much for him, at least for a moment, and he lay, still and defeated, and listened to the renewed screams from the camp.

He wasn’t sure if it was the dream or not, but for a moment a tall, ferret-faced white man was towering over him, pointing a little pistol at his belly, and he felt very alone. Then the man spoke, and it was all very clear and slow but not, terrifyingly, a dream.

“He’s skinny as a polecat, Mr. Bludner. Thin. Got the swamp fevuh. He’s dead already.”

“Leave him. We’ll get him when we round up the othuhs.” And the narrow face was gone.

Slave-takers. If he wasn’t in the dream, he needed to get away. If they knew he had killed Gordon, he couldn’t allow himself to be taken. He began to crawl toward the water, only a few feet beyond the trail. It was deep here-full of things, but deep. He pulled himself along and kicked with his legs, sweating away every bit of water his bowels had left him, and he heard the sharp crack of the rifles again, not far away in the bush, and then he was sliding into the water.

He had some distant notion of hiding. Indeed, he had little expectation of anything after he reached the water. But it was so cold that it seemed to wake him up and charge him with energy, and he swam out into the deepest part, where they bathed, and then across toward the green scum where the big fish and the biggest frogs lived on the far side.

Virgil heard the shots and knew he was too late, but he didn’t slow himself, bursting into the edge of the camp only a few moments after the first flurry of fire. He couldn’t tell, as Caesar could, the different pieces by their different sounds, but he was unsurprised to find Lolly lying dead in a vast pool of blood, his gut shot and a small hole in the middle of his face, right at the top of his nose. The back of his head was all over the inside of their little wigwam. His eyes were wide open. It might have made Virgil sick, but he was too angry, and he blamed himself. He ran on. Old Ben lay in the clearing, the old fowler fallen beside

him. He was mewling like a kitten, making pitiful noises every time he exhaled. Both hands clutched at his belly, which was caked in mud and blood and something worse, something gray that was leaking out of him. He didn’t scream. He just lay and made that dreadful noise. Virgil paused and looked at him, and then reached down and stripped the little pouch and horn for the fowler over the old man’s head. Old Ben didn’t resist, but he didn’t seem to know what was happening, either, and he let out a mournful sound when Virgil rolled him back on his side. Virgil tried to be gentle, but he knew he was hurting the old man by the time he got the powder horn. It had to be done.

He picked up the fowler and moved along the trail where, apparently, Ben had fallen while the others ran. The whites must be right on them, although the forest was somehow quieter. He moved to the edge of the camp and took shelter in the shadow of a giant tree, and elected to wait. He had learned this while hunting with Caesar: when you don’t know exactly what your quarry is doing, be silent and wait.

Something moved in the deepest part of the river, but he didn’t pay it much mind. Twice he heard voices, softly, but the day was fading fast and nothing seemed to get any closer to him, and then, suddenly, they were both in the clearing, and Virgil realized that it was much darker than he had thought.

“That thin boy crawled away.”

“No mattuh, Weymes. We kilt the old man with the gun. We’ll claim his bounty an’ the younguh one, too. We got the one I caught.” He laughed. “If’n they was all this easy, this would be a good an’ godly way to live, Weymes. Wheah’d you leave the one you tied?”

“Up the trail. Come on, Mr. Bludner. If you don’ min’ the swamp in the dark, I do.”

“I don’ think of you as a delicate flowuh, Brother Weymes.” The taller of the two men bent over Old Ben and cut his throat, then cut the whole top of the skin of his head away. The shorter man did the same to Lolly. Ben’s little moans had stopped some time since, and Virgil told himself that the poor man had been dead before his throat was cut, but the image of the act stayed with Virgil for the rest of his life.

Virgil thought of shooting at them, there and then, but they had the boy, Jim, and only they knew where he was. Virgil waited some more and followed the two white men when they started back. It was several miles, and they set a fast pace, clearly unconcerned with pursuit. Their contempt for any opposition from the black men burned Virgil like fire. He knew he was responsible for Ben’s death and Lolly’s, and he flamed with desire for revenge, expiation and freedom from the knowledge that he had killed his friends-perhaps killed them all.

He padded down the trail and thought about death.

He might have run right on them and died, he was so lost inside his own guilt. Then the sounds of the swamp changed, a subtle change, more of a lack than a presence, but Virgil felt it and he stopped, disoriented, and listened to the silence. A crow cawed away in front of him. Something had spooked the crow and everything else.

Ahead of him, Jim began to cry out in pain. Virgil was determined not to lose the boy, and he pressed on, no slower but with his attention focused on the task at hand. He saw a flicker of white among the trees, and then another. One of the men was in a shirt and the pale linen gave him away. They were stopped by a tree on the trail.

They were cutting the boy down from the tree.

He was almost on them; the boy was there, and his heart rose.

Virgil didn’t hesitate, or plan. He ran down the trail-better trampled today than ever before-until he came to the little space where it crossed two tiny streams in a dozen feet. The two whites and the boy were just beyond the streams, where the boy had been tied tightly to a swamp oak. His returning circulation caused him to flop on the ground with more force than he could have used in full control of his limbs, and for a moment he was free of his captors, though too far gone to help himself. He rolled and spasmed, the agony of the returning blood more powerful than any desire to run.

When Virgil was just a few feet from the taller man, whom Virgil had marked as the more dangerous, the man looked up and bellowed a warning. He tried to lever himself up from the crouch he was in and move back off the trail, but fell backwards, helpless and off balance. Virgil snapped his pistol in the big man’s face, and the prime flashed, but the barrel didn’t fire. Virgil kicked the man as hard as he could and whirled, dropping the pistol and looking for the little man, who was pointing a rifle at him a few feet away in the soft moonlight and smiling. The smile died as the man realized that his rifle was uncocked-that he had made a fool’s mistake and not reloaded after the last shot. Virgil’s fowler was loaded with shot, and the shot flew a little high in Virgil’s inexperienced hands, ripping into the man’s face and hands. He screamed, but he was not new to pain, and even as he fell he reached in his hunting pouch for a pistol. Virgil, his mind suddenly clear of doubt and his actions written out for him like morning orders, held the fowler, picked up the pistol he had dropped, plucked the crippled boy off the trail and ran into the dark. A shot barked at them, and then another, but Virgil clutched his precious burdens and ran.

Boston, October 1775

Washington sat atop his charger, his heavy greatcoat bundled about his ears, and regarded Boston through Charles Lee’s new Dollond telescope. It was a beautiful thing: wooden barrel twenty inches long and a fast resolution in the hand. Washington hadn’t owned a glass in the Pennsylvania wars. Truth to tell, there had seldom been a vista long enough to use one, through all the trees. This was a different type of warfare, a slow siege where logistics would matter more than tactics. Washington had the patience for a siege, and he wanted the time to train his army.

Incongruous thoughts of the season wouldn’t leave his head this morning. He wondered if either of his farms had managed a winter crop of wheat; he longed for a report from his manager. He thought of his farms every day and wrote advice to his overseers whenever he could.

Below him, spread like a printer’s study of an untidy siege, were the British lines; closer in, his own lines, stronger than they had been. The sentries, long-suffering militia or temporary “regulars”, had blankets, and one lucky fellow a watch coat. Watch coats were the proper military garments for winter sentries; they were coming, slowly, from Philadelphia. Washington centered his telescope on the three figures. One man was quite old; the other two were prime. They all had cartridge boxes. Washington smiled grimly. He would be lucky if they had ten rounds a man. Powder was still the critical element.

As he watched, a British field piece fired-a tiny white blossom of smoke against the bleak gray landscape and the darker lines of their revetments. None of the sentries moved. The ball fell just short, splattering them with mud, hopped a little on a short graze, and rolled over the harder ground by the parapet. One of the sentries leapt after it, placing rocks in its path to slow it. It was a small ball-perhaps a four-pounder, or a six. At this distance, Washington couldn’t tell, but he hoped the sentry wouldn’t be fool enough to try and stop it before it had lost more energy. Men had lost feet by such antics.

It stopped on its own, and the man flourished it triumphantly at his mates and carried it back to his post, where he put it on a small pile of shot. All three men appeared animated.

Washington folded the telescope and handed it to its owner.

“War does not seem to have a terrifying aspect today.”

Lee brought it to his eye in a practiced movement. He swept it over the harbor, then over the town, then slowly along the lines.

“That’s the King’s Own in the lines today,” he said. “Blue facings, and those well-cocked hats.”

Washington smiled. A sharp regiment. Both had noticed over the months the careful attention the Fourth gave to their uniforms and drill.

A wheelbarrow pushed by two men came down the road past Washington’s staff. Neither man saluted, particularly, although both inclined their heads in a civil enough way. They pushed their barrow down the long slope to the advanced post where the sentries were once again huddled against their fleche.

“If we allow these enlistments to run out, every watch coat and blanket we issue will be lost. It is not so much that we lose the army,” Lee was never at his best when talking about the Massachusetts men, “as the difficulty we endure in losing the arms and accoutrements.”

“Nevertheless, General, I wish to procure more blankets, and see them issued immediately.”

“Of course, sir.”

“How many requests have we written for blankets?” He turned and held out his hand for the glass again, and one of his staff dismounted and opened a saddlebag to retrieve a volume of the army correspondence. They had such volumes now, and daily returns for equipment and ammunition. The Virginia Farmer knew how many bayonets were available in every regiment (too few) and who had muskets with slings. That much he had accomplished, and just the lists had taken him a month. Equipping them might take years, and the pressure from Congress was mounting. He had to evict the British from Boston before they were relieved by a huge fleet and thousands of men who might break his lines and boil out into the countryside, or so the Congress feared.

Lee handed the glass over again.

“A very fine instrument, General.”

“Thank you, sir. I had it last week from London.”

Most of the staff were dismounted now, pulling at flasks or lighting pipes while they all ran through whatever documentation was handy. Washington insisted that when he was away from headquarters, business must continue on horseback. He smiled ruefully at the provenance of the telescope; his sword was from London, and his pistols, and much of his war material. So far, the war had served better than all George Mason’s sermons to impress on him how essential were the ties of trade between the American colonies and their mother country.

The wheelbarrow had arrived at the sentry post. The three sentries were helping the two other men load their collection of British cannonballs into the barrow. There were several calibers, four-pounders and six, and one larger ball that might have come from a ship in the harbor with her big twelve-pounders. One of the men with the wheelbarrow paid the sentries. Washington could see the paper scrip changing hands. He shook his head. The wheelbarrow began creeping crabwise across the hill, toward the small battery that the Massachusetts gunners had sited and built so laboriously in late August.

“General Washington?” An apple-cheeked staff officer with the diction particular to the graduates of the Yale Divinity school. Washington nodded courteously and looked down.

“We have written for blankets eight times, and watch coats twice, sir.” The man smiled, proud of the speed with which this gem of knowledge had been discovered and polished.

“Pray mention it in the draft for a ninth letter.”

Lee chuckled mirthlessly. “In time, there won’t be a farmer in this colony we haven’t provided for.”

“General Lee, I do not always find these remarks helpful.”

Lee turned his head, respect warring with an almost overwhelming desire to answer sharply and the struggle plain on his face. Washington put the glass back to his eye. He meant the rebuke, but hoped that Lee would accept it and not reply. General Lee was a first-rate soldier, and Washington could not imagine what the summer would have been like without him. Certainly, General Arnold’s expedition would not have been sent to Quebec even as late as it had been. If Washington now commanded the army, Lee commanded the staff.

The wheelbarrow had finally reached the distant artillery. Washington was warm from the waist down, where the heat of his horse bathed his legs and coat. Above the waist, the wind pushed through his coat and the salt sea air kept him damp and cold. His fingers were becoming painful in the mornings. He kept the glass to his eye, shutting out Lee’s possible insubordination. The Yale man was still by his stirrup. I should have held my tongue until we were alone. That was ill done.

The artillerists were loading their six-pounder. Washington knew it was the six-pounder because it was bronze, a captured French piece from the last war and one of the truest in the service, and the polished barrel glinted in the gray light. He could see the gun captain whirling his flaming linstock in the air over his head, a very martial sight that stirred Washington faintly.

The linstock came down across the breech of the gun and it responded instantly with a fine mushroom of smoke. The sharp “bang” of a good shot and dry powder followed a moment later. The depression of the shot was too low for anyone to follow its fall or its line, but within a few seconds there was a commotion at the British advance post. Washington looked at it through the glass. Three of the smart King’s Own men were gathered around a fourth, prone. Washington could see from the numbers that they had been changing the guard. The downed man was spasming hard, probably screaming, but his voice was lost in the wind and the distance.

“Hit with their own ball,” said Lee, in an odd, strained voice. He had friends in the British Army, but then, they all did.

Washington watched the British pickets making shift to move their wounded man. Every man of them had a watch coat, a musket, and a bayonet, made by the same mills that made most of his army’s equipment. There was blood visible on the mud, even at this distance, and Washington knew from experience that the human body held a prodigious amount of blood. The shot must have taken off a leg.

Washington handed Lee his glass and turned his horse away as the British artillery fired again.

Great Dismal Swamp, October 1775

It took Caesar another week to break the fever, and he was thin and listless, gradually moving from total apathy about food to a raging hunger that he lacked the energy to satisfy. In his fever, he couldn’t imagine what had happened; during his daily moments of lucidity, he still couldn’t understand where the others had gone or where he was himself. Unbeknownst to his rational mind, he crawled every day in his fever, dragging his hot and exhausted body through the tangle of undergrowth in a circle, so that he never awoke from the fever in the same place.

When he finally came up from real sleep, listless but in possession of his faculties for the first time in days, he was unable to guess his location. He had nothing to hunt with and he couldn’t see open water where he might catch a frog. He tried eating the base of cat-tails but the bitter flavor made them hard to eat despite his hunger. They gave him a little energy, though, and he began to move north, as best he could, hoping to see something he would recognize. He had no reason to think he had drifted south from the camp, but he had to choose a direction, and north was the choice.

He was almost naked: his shirt gone, his breeches a ruin that barely covered his legs, no boots, no jacket, and caked in mud and the fine vegetable matter that lay over every inch of the swamp’s floor. He was growing desperate for water. He began to suspect he was going to die after all, having survived the fever. When he tried to think back, he couldn’t decide whether the slave-takers’ attack had been real or part of his fever, although logic suggested that it had to be real or he wouldn’t be alone in the swamp. That depressed him further, as it meant that he alone had survived. The utter defeat and extinction of his little band made him a failure as a leader, and he tried to think what he might have done better. He mourned the men, even those he hadn’t liked so well. He felt tremendous guilt. Eventually he stopped walking, although a fitter man would have heard from the bird cries that he was near open water. Caesar slumped down at the base of a giant ancient swamp willow. He didn’t so much sleep as surrender. His eyes, puffy and dry, were open but unfocused. He began to lean a little sideways, gradually slipping down the trunk, curling a little to ease the griping in his gut, sweat dripping off his nose.

He considered the possibility of standing up. It seemed reasonable. He was at the end, and death was near, and he decided that he would push himself up the trunk until he could stand if for no other reason than to spite the pain in his gut. And it occurred to him, as if from a distance, that despite his many failures and the ruin of his body, he was going to die free. That was worth something. He began to rise, slowly, almost glacially, and then with a mis-step and a stumble back against the trunk, he was erect.

The movement saved him. Jim saw it away across an arm of the open water, like a deer moving, and he ran around the water and found Caesar standing on trembling legs, rocking back and forth. Jim didn’t have the training to recognize that Caesar had a ghost spear and a ghost shield and was holding them ready. Jim couldn’t see that, but he could just see that it was Caesar-his hero, almost his god-and in minutes Caesar was gulping water from a stolen leather fire bucket in a new camp. He was alive.

It took him another week to recover, with food brought to his side every day. Virgil tried to keep the story of the slave-takers from him, but day by day he learned the whole of it, from the apparent treachery of the woman to the last shots in the woods.

“How bad was they hurt?”

“Little one hu’t bad, Caesar. I shot he face off!” Virgil was anxious to expiate the sin he had committed. The lives of Old Ben and Lolly were heavy on him, and he had buried them in the old camp with good crosses over them, although Lolly had not been a Christian man at all.

“What about the woman?”

“I won’ be goin’ to her again, Caesar.”

Tom was sitting on a stump, whittling with his long razor knife. He looked up and laughed bitterly.

“She’ll be long gone wi’ them slavers, you ninny. How’d a boy like you grow up so simple, Virgil? She was jus’ honey to catch flies.”

“How bad was the othuh, the other, one hurt, Virgil?”

“Jus’ roughed up, I think. I kicked him pretty ha’d in the weddin’ tackle.”

“So they won’ be back after us right away?”

“No. No, Caesar. We safe fo’ a whiles.”

“Time to move again, though. We should go north. We haven’t been north in a long time. If they send militia, they look fo’ us down here, I think. An’ we need to hit a farm.”

Long Tom looked at the pistol in his lap. He hadn’t fired a shot at the slave-takers, and he was in a mood.

“We should hit that farm that this fool an’ the boy keep goin’ to.” He waved his hand. “They gave them slave-takers a home. Let’s burn ’em out and take what we want.”

Virgil stirred. “They got black folks, and them slaves has helped us and helped us. We burn that farm an’ who’s gonna pay for it? Them black folks. I say no. I say we steal something, or just ax for it from the ol’ woman. But burn ’em out ain’t fair.”

“He got happy memories o’ that place,” sneered Tom. The others murmured assent. They wanted blood.

Caesar rolled off his fern pallet and looked around, his eyes still bloodshot.

“We will go to the farm. We will not burn it!” He looked around at the survivors. “If we burn it and kill the farmers, we will jus’ draw the militia after us. Let’s jus’ take what we need an’ git. We might make it free that way. Tom, you shut it. You jus’ jealous that he got somethin’ you didn’. Now everyone jus’ go sleep. We’ll do it tomorrow.”

The survivors of the band grumbled, but they went. And Caesar, still miserable over the losses, puzzled to figure out why he was still in charge.

They moved well, the remaining men almost silent on the trail and then moving up to the back of the pole barn. There were no horses in the little paddock, and the only smoke came from the slave cabin. The white man wasn’t pulling stumps, either.

Jim led the way to the back of the barn and then darted across the yard to the slaves’ cabin, where he knocked quietly. Then he disappeared inside. He was gone long enough for Tom and Virgil to check their priming, for Caesar to start to sweat from the exertion. He was out of condition and needed to eat better. He was still thin. The size of his forearms startled and disgusted him every time he looked down-like sticks. The weight of the fowler on his arms was enough to make him want to lie down.

The door opened and an old black man emerged, clearly BaKongo, with Jim following behind and hopping along with excitement. The old man came up the edge of the barn and stopped, peering into the bush.

“No one heah but us, boys,” he called, and Caesar moved carefully into the open, well covered, he hoped, by the two pistols.

“You do look a sight, mistuh,” said the old man when he saw Caesar’s scarecrow figure draped in rags. “You boys been livin’ hahd!”

“That we have, old man.” He was old, too, with most of his head white; yet he still glowed with vitality like a village elder. Caesar was respectful of his age and knew that Tom and Virgil would be the same.

“Since the Man and Missus ran off, we got bacon.” The old man smiled. “Come in an’ have some.”

A regiment of slave-takers couldn’t have stopped the rush for the cabin.

“That scatterbrained gal left with those men,” the old woman said while she laid another few slices of bacon on her griddle. Then she busied herself pouring the fat into a little betty lamp on the hearth.

“Ain’t had this much fat since I can’ remember when.” She sounded almost smug.

“What abou’ Sally, ma’am?”

“Don’ you ma’am me, you cock turkey! She gone off with they louts wha’ own her, and good riddance, though I mus’ say she did work she didn’ have to. They kep’ her for her coney an’ nothin’ else, an’ that’s hard on any gal, so I shouldn’ talk mean. But I ain’t sorry to see her gone.” She looked a dagger at her man. He laughed as if it were a compliment and went back to entertaining young Jim. Long Tom was fast asleep, full of corn meal cakes and bacon, and Caesar had a hard time staying awake himself, although it was clear that Virgil still wanted to know where his Sally had gone.

“Why’d the white folks here run off?”

“Afeared! An’ of you, I reckon. You hurt that mean little fella bad. He los’ an eye an’ I’m not too sure but he’ll die. That othuh one, that big fella…He was beat! Lef’ heah like a whipped cur. Said there was twenny of yous, an’ you was right behin’ him. The Man, he jus packed his mule and tol’ us to stay put an’ lef. But we heard othuh tales from Sally, too.”

The old woman’s head shot around. “What othuh tales, missuh? What you heah fro’ that gal that I don’ heah?”

“You don’ know everythin’, now do you, Sukey?”

“I don’ take gals fo’ no rides in the hay now, do I? An’ that gal young enough to be my granddaughter? I imagine she said things under her shift that she don’ say to no ol’ woman with a hoe.”

The old man just shook his head and chuckled.

“I think you tryin’ to flatter me, woman.” He looked at Caesar. “Sally says that they’s rumors that the governor in Virginny is gon’ free the slaves to fight for him agin’ the farmers. You know ‘bout that?”

“We heard something like that back some months.”

“Yeah, well now seems to be fo’ sho. Sally said they was gon’ have a proclamation in Williamsburg. I ask her how she know and she jus’ rolls that bottom and smiles.”

“They slave-takers came heah fro’ Richmond. They knew a few things, too.”

“They said they came to take the bounty ‘cause all the militia is gettin’ ready to go aftuh the governor.”

Caesar tried to assimilate all this. He tried to sound the old man out on the sides forming up in this war, but to the old man it was just the governor and his soldiers against the back-country farmers.

“Same thin’ happen a few years back,” he said, leaning forward over the hearth to light a pipe. The night was dark and the cabin completely without light except the little betty lamp burning a scrap of rag in the fat above the fire’s last coals. It was deadly hot in the cabin, but no one seemed to want to leave it for the cooler outdoors, at least not while there was well water, tobacco, and bacon to be had.

“Farmers down south decided not to pay the Carolina Assembly taxes. They got an army together. Then Tryon, he the governor, he gets an army loyal to the assembly an’ kicks they tails right back into the mountains. He threatened to arm the slaves, too. But he didn’.”

“Will Dunmore do it? Will he free an’ arm the slaves?”

“I don’ know him that well, boy!”

Tom laughed in the half-darkness on the other side of the hearth.

“Virgil? Tom? What do you say?”

“Say to what?”

“That we get us going up to Williamsburg an’ see if we can join Governor Dunmore?”

Tom laughed his cynical laugh. “Then we can be the militia an’ hunt white boys in the swamp! We’d be good at it, too.”

Virgil was less assured.

“Long way to Williamsburg. Lot o’ bad men between heah and theah.”

The old man’s face showed for a moment in the dark as he sucked on his pipe and the coal glowed.

“You jus’ go quiet, you be all right, I reckon. If all the white folks is as scared as these,” he waved his pipe toward the larger cabin, “an you take care, you ought to get theah.”

“Don’ have to decide tonight,” Caesar said, walking to the door in search of a breeze. But he had already made up his mind.

“You jus’ wan’ go an’ follow that gal!” Long Tom’s head hurt and he was not happy that they were heading straight off in the morning, away from what he saw as free food and an easy life.

Virgil so obviously wanted to follow the girl that it was pointless to argue. Caesar left them to it and went to the white cabin, where he lifted the latch and went in. There wasn’t much left but the furniture and some food, although he got enough powder in a keg to fill his horn and the little mermaid horn as well. And he took the man’s clothes. They didn’t fit him well, and the breeches were almost like trousers, the man had been so tall. He hadn’t left any shoes, and he’d taken his greatcoat. There was a small woman’s cloak, and Caesar took it. Virgil hoisted out a side of bacon and cut it in half with a sharp little ax he found, and gave the half of it to the old black couple.

“Tell ’em we held you at gunpoint.” Tom laughed. “Stand and deliver the bacon!”

Young Jim picked up a shovel and an old pack, which they filled with corn meal and made him carry. With the corn meal and the bacon, they were good for five days, more if they skimped, though Caesar doubted that they would. He had them on the road before the sun was very high, walking quickly as the shadows shortened and the bugs came out. Somehow the stinging ones seemed thicker on the little one-hump trail than in their own heart of the swamp. Jim, used to moving unencumbered along the trails of the swamp, thought he was going to drop under the burden of the pack and the torment of the bugs.

Every time they heard a sound they melted into the woods, turning ankles on roots in their hurry to clear the road, but they never saw another soul, and by the end of the long day they were too tired and footsore to care. None of them had even a scrap of shoe left, but the swamp had not hardened their feet even enough to deal with the soft mud that made the road for most of its length, as it still had rocks and pebbles and gravel where farmers had filled the wettest spots.

They passed six farms, most of them new. All were abandoned. One farmer had left his slaves, but they were as scared of Caesar’s runaways as they were of whites and wouldn’t unbar their doors. At the last empty farm, they tried the door but found the bar across, and slept well in the barn. An early winter rain on the shingles woke them, but they were dry. Jim built a little fire that barely smoked the rafters and made bacon, and they wasted the day. Caesar encouraged it; they were as safe as they ever might be again, and dry and well fed, and he needed the rest. They had come a long way the first day. They had a very long way to go.

The third morning they moved on again. Their track was punctuated with crossroads and bypaths that confused them more and more. When the road forked or offered a branch, Tom or Virgil would run off down it a bit and come back and describe what he had seen. Then they would all decide, although Caesar’s vote began to hold more and more weight as he was proven correct. He wasn’t infallible, and one of his choices came to a dead end in a clearing with a tiny plot of vegetables and the start of a cabin. It had been abandoned, and wasted them a mile of walking, but it was well off the road and safe, and he decided that they would make camp there. They built a big fire and piled brush over the cabin’s base to make a hut. Caesar got two rabbits with as many shots-a poor use of powder, but he had enough for the moment and refused to worry overmuch. The shots were loud in the wild silence and somehow made him tense, but he was tired of the bacon and wanted to make it last. They were wandering lost at the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, and until they got clear, he would be worried about the food and the threat of pursuit.

It wasn’t a good night, but it wasn’t impossible to sleep, although Caesar’s new breeches had chafed him unmercifully and he couldn’t find a way to lie easy. They didn’t fit at the crotch at all. None of them had a needle and thread, either; that was all gone with Old Ben. They talked about him and Lolly, and even Fetch-all their dead. Caesar worried a little about Jim; he was seeing too much death for his age. He wouldn’t be right, later. But the boy seemed cheerful enough, delighted with the notion that he was going to be a soldier. It was a cold night, and they had no blankets. They all huddled in a ball together and slept by turns, those on the outside too cold to sleep, those on the inside warm but crushed.

In the cold and wet of early morning, it was hard to get them to move. The walking kept taking its toll, and the tedium of constant anxiety was sapping their desire to go to Williamsburg at all. They were all tired from bad sleep, and a little hungry all the time. The wet was new. Their camps in the swamp had been snug. The rain was hard on their brush shelter and beginning to drip through, the drops cold on Caesar’s skin as he considered the others, mumbling to each other as they tried to crawl deeper into the shelter for warmth. He let them lie a while, and the rain brought warmer air. Caesar stayed awake. Four days of walking and good food were building him up. He felt better than he had since the fever hit. After a bit he threw the woman’s cloak over Jim and got up into the light rain and cleaned their pot with ash from the fire, a very rudimentary job. Then he wiped down his fowler, checked his pouch, gathered their few belongings, and woke them all up. In a few minutes, they were shambling off back up the track to the road, although Virgil slowed them while he fetched a coal from the old fire and tried to get his pipe lit. As soon as they reached the road, they were faced with choices of direction.

Caesar looked at the three paths headed off into the endless trees. “They all go north, now.”

“Right enough.” Tom had a strong sense of direction.

“Williamsburg is north and then some.”

“And across the bay, too. How we gon’ cross the bay?”

“Deal with that when we get to it. I reckon we can get a boat, or steal it.”

He looked at the three trails and reached out for Virgil’s pipe, which was lit and making the round. He didn’t usually smoke, but it helped his energy, and it kept the flies at bay.

“I figure it’s time to go east a bit. So we take the right.”

No one argued, and off they went.

By the end of that day, Caesar was growing tempted to head across country even if it meant facing the wet edge of the swamp. The trails and roads at the edge of the cultivated parts of Virginia were so unmarked, so empty, and so winding that he feared they might be going in circles. The added fear of discovery settled the issue. After a warm camp and no rain, they set off across country the next day, leaving the rough roads. The shortage of food that now worried Caesar was a cause for Jim’s secret rejoicing; the wallet of corn meal was three-quarters empty and no longer hurt him to carry. Virgil’s quarter of bacon was well down, too, although it still drew a cloud of flies every time they stopped.

Perhaps because of the lightened loads, or perhaps because they really were out of the swamp, they moved north quickly, and nightfall found them on the edge of a big plantation, the first they had seen. Caesar gave the word, and after a hasty meal in the woods they moved in the dark across the fields. No dogs barked, although the houses they saw now were lit. They clutched their guns and moved as quietly as they could, every one of them conscious that capture with a gun in hand would mean certain death. When they were too tired to go further, Caesar kept them at it past several lesser farms until they reached a wooded break extending off into the dark on both sides. The trees were large, and Caesar thought the area had been left for the master to hunt. All the better. He led them in on a deer path, and in an hour, the rising sun found them buried in fresh fall leaves, warm and asleep.

He wouldn’t risk the smoke from a fire when they awoke. They grumbled, but thirst drove them out of the woods before the sun was fully set, and they slipped down to the stream at the base of a long shallow ridge. The water was brackish and muddy from recent rain, and Caesar didn’t want to drink it, but he did. They all did. The sun went down in a blaze of color, somehow startling after the swamp. Sunsets happened in the swamp, but far away above the ever-present trees. The open country stretched away, beautiful and alien after the limited horizons they had lived with for months. They all stopped together in silent wonder. They sat on rocks under the bank of the little stream and watched the sun until the western sky showed only a faint trace of pumpkin afterglow and stars, and then Caesar led them away.

They moved in better moonlight that night, as the half moon was tending toward full. Caesar couldn’t remember the moon waning, and he could only figure that he had lost some time in his fever. Superstition and the sunset tried to tell him that time might pass differently out of the swamp, where things were open and it was harder to hide.

He didn’t want to try the loyalties of other slaves as they passed plantations and farms. He was afraid of betrayal and afraid that any slave who helped him would be dead if his own little band were caught and questioned. But as they headed a little east and stayed parallel to the road he knew they needed a fire and food. They had about one good meal left.

He led them east for half a day and got into some trees along another little muddy creek. It was miles from the nearest house and the country seemed wild. The last plantation was two days behind and they had seen only scattered cabins. Caesar judged it safe to build a small fire and cook the rest of the bacon. He risked a shot at a goose on the water, which Jim swam out and retrieved. They didn’t do a thorough job of cooking the goose, but it was fatty and it fed them, with the bacon as a breakfast, and corncakes to fill in the nooks and crannies. Grumbling decreased immediately, although Caesar knew they were at the end of the food.

He had a hazy idea that Williamsburg was on the other side of the bay; that much he remembered from the day when he had sailed into the Chesapeake as a new slave. He had no idea how they were going to cross that huge body of water, and he knew that it was miles around and with many inlets, bays, and rivers, all populated by slave owners. This was Tidewater, the heart of plantation country. By comparison, the Great Dismal Swamp was a haven. They were going to need food before crossing the bay. Caesar felt that the obvious solution would be to kill and butcher a big animal like a deer, if any could be found, and he was out early looking at the ground. What he found was both good and bad.

They were all awake when he returned, a tiny fire burning among the roots of an old oak. The smoke ran right up the tree and got lost among the branches, a good trick they had learned in the swamp. It didn’t cover everything, though.

“Smelt that fire a mile away,” he commented acidly as he entered their little camp.

“We kept you some tea, an’ it’s hot,” said Jim. He didn’t seem apologetic for the fire. They didn’t really believe that anyone would be looking for them, thought Caesar. Every one of them had been pursued, or had fought the slave-takers, and yet they didn’t really believe.

“There’s tracks down by the creek,” he said. “Man tracks, in boots.”

“Dogs?” asked Virgil. He was suddenly more alert.

“No dogs. But three men, moving fast. They went off north and east, the way we have to go.”

“Boots means white men,” said Tom.

“That it do. I saw deer tracks, too, over the hill.”

“Can’t shoot no deer while there’s men out there.”

“I’m goin’ to see if I can do jus’ that, friends.”

“We should all go.”

“Nope. I’ll take Jim. He’s the quietest. Virgil, you an’ Tom stay here, don’ make much fire, and keep your ears open. We need a place to go if we get spotted. Build us a frame to hang a deer and sharpen the knives. We need the meat an’ I’m goin’.”

It was a long speech, for Caesar. He sounded firm and decided, and none of them saw much point in arguing. It was the way he had-sure of himself, and sure of others. Jim followed him with the eagerness of a young dog, and Virgil rubbed out the little fire. Tom pulled out his razor knife and picked up a branch.

Tidewater, Virginia, October 1775

George Lawrence was a picture of martial ardor. He wore a fine blue coat with scarlet facings, like the Virginia Provincials had worn under Washington in the war against the French except cut in the latest style, with narrow lapels and less cloth everywhere. Followers of the military arts knew that this style reflected the growing military passion in Europe for all things Prussian; Frederick the Great had decreed that there would be less material in coats.

Lawrence had never paid much attention to his Latin or Greek, and his knowledge of mathematics was not on the firmest ground, but he had devoured all the military science that the booksellers of Williamsburg and London had to offer, against the day when he would don a uniform. And now he commanded a company in the Virginia militia. It was a start on his path to better things. In Boston, George Washington, another Virginian, was the commander in chief of a real Continental Army, the regular army of the colonies. Lawrence aspired to command a company in that army. To win the trust of Virginia would require success in Virginia and money. That started right here, at the recruiting table, where he was completing his company with any decent body he could get to sign the bill and take his bounty. Not every company offered a bounty, but he had the money, and it allowed him to pick and choose a little more.

His recruiting table sat in the yard of the King’s Arms Tavern, the best tavern in the town. No one else had yet seen the humor in the conflict between the name and his purpose, but he smiled every time he looked at the sign. Englishmen-that is to say, bankers and brokers-had driven his father to bankruptcy, broken them as a family, and taken their plantation. Patient work and a great deal of luck had restored the family fortunes through trade, but George never forgot the attitude of his father’s London brokers. They were greedier than Indians, and more rapacious. That is how Lawrence saw Parliament in London: as a group of brokers and bankers seeking to do unto America as Bailey and Callis, Brokers, of Bristol, had done to his family. He would raise men at the King’s Arms, but the arms they would bear would be against the king.

On his table lay broadsheets advertising the rates of pay and a rather hopeful view of the possibility of land grants at the end of the war, as well as the bounty and the country’s need. His best sergeant, Rob McCoy, sat behind the table in the same blue coat with red facings, a powerful image of martial splendor. Behind him stood Lawrence’s drummer, a young black, in reversed colors, a red coat with blue facings. Few of the militia companies had drummers, and even fewer had the money to ape European professionals and provide their musicians with reversed color clothing, but Lawrence was a stickler for such things. Besides, the boy was free and quite a talented drummer; with the coat, he got as many admiring stares as the sergeant.

Captain Lawrence nodded at the drummer, young Noah. “Point of war.”

That was the black boy’s great talent; he had actually spent so much time around the military camps that he knew most of the military beatings. He could beat for firewood details and signal officers’ call. He lengthened his captain’s reach beyond the sound of Lawrence’s already powerful voice. Lawrence spoiled him, because next to his veteran sergeant, the boy was the most valuable member of his company.

The boy smiled and the drumsticks flashed as he raised them beside his head, held them rock steady for a moment, and then brought them down like thunder on the taut skin of the drumhead. He rattled through the point of war like a regular army drummer, and every head on the street turned to watch.

“Serve your country and earn the bounty!” called McCoy. A piece of silver flashed in his hands.

“Five shillings hard specie! Drink to Virginia on the colony’s money! Preserve your rights against the grasping king! Drive Dunmore into the sea!”

It was as much excitement as the market town had seen in a long time. Rural Virginia didn’t see a great many fine laced coats, or drummer boys, or martial sergeants. Men began to come around, reading the proclamations and broadsheets on the table from a safe distance.

The first recruit they attracted here was typical: George Lake, an apprentice. He was healthy and fit, not indentured, and had enough teeth to bite a cartridge. He didn’t own his own weapon, which cost him part of his bounty, but he still got two shillings and a place to sleep. He looked intelligent and delighted to be part of the army. Once Lawrence had his name on the books and had given him his bounty in cash, he asked the young man if he would stay with the company if it were taken into the Continental service. The boy replied that he was sure he would.

“I do long to see the world.”

“Can you read, George?”

“I can read some, sir.” Lawrence let him go, wishing he could have a dozen such. The boy left, glowing, to find more friends to join.

After the first man tested the waters, there was a rush-a mix of patriotism and economic necessity, as the poorer classes who had been hardest hit by the troubles with England rushed to the bounty and the hope of regular pay. There were other recruits, too: several decent yeomen’s sons, and one young man who himself owned property, a small farm in the local red soil. Lawrence took him aside and ascertained that he came from the Carters, a distant relation, and that his people were prominent in this part of the county. Lawrence was holding his lieutenant’s commission vacant for a friend, but he was allowed two ensigns. He had heard that some of the militia companies were electing officers and sergeants, but he had no intention of letting such rot spread in his own company. He wanted them to be like regulars, and hoped that he would be able to place the whole company on the Virginia establishment, or better, the Continental establishment, when he had filled his roster. So it was natural enough that, although this young farmer was willing to join in the ranks, Lawrence took him aside and offered him a commission, which the man instantly accepted.

He filled a platoon in the morning, although a few of the men who took the bounty were sorry men who would make dismal soldiers. Most, however, were strong men, farm labor, with some experience of arms, or eager boys like George Lake. Lawrence liked Lake. Good material.

The afternoon was slower, as he expected it would be. Most who would join did so in the first rush; those who went home to have a think seldom came back. The original militia raised by the counties had all the best local men already; it was the additional companies that had to complete in this difficult and expensive way. Lawrence was already doubting what he had heard, that the Continentals were going to have to recruit from scratch as well, and not out of the militia. Farms still had to be farmed, and magistrates could not all go off to be officers.

He sat well back from the table and drank sherry as the afternoon wore away, unaffected by a pint or so, and tolerably happy with the success he had. At two by his big silver watch he went in and dined, and sent good meals out to the sergeant and the drummer. By three they were all tempted to doze off, and Lawrence kept the drummer at it to keep them awake.

“Find us a fifer, lad!” he kept saying. “There must be a blackie here who can play the fife!”

And the boy would smile, a little shy, and look away.

Sergeant McCoy thought that they should take their recruits and march away.

“Rendezvous at the camp is in two days’ time.”

“We can get there in a day, Rob, and every man we have at muster is going to be gold when we have to fight. This town’s been good to us; give it the afternoon. And don’t be in such a rush to leave the comfort of a bed. Especially when it comes with something in it, eh?”

McCoy laughed mechanically. The captain may have had something bouncy in his bed; all McCoy had for companionship were little biting bugs.

“Let’s see if we can’t complete the company. We’ll march in the morning.”

Just after three, two men rode up to the tavern on spent horses. They looked badly used: one had his face swathed in dirty bandages, and the other rode with his knees up so high that he looked like an old sack on a tall horse. The two men had a look of meanness that might have deterred normal approaches, but it was like an invitation to the recruiting sergeant.

“Do you gentlemen fancy five free shillings hard currency?” Sergeant McCoy held up his big fist with the money.

The taller man smiled a little. “Milishee?”

“That’s right.”

McCoy could see that there was old dried blood on the filthy bandage that the smaller man had on his face.

“Could have used you boys in the swamp. Had a set-to with some runaways.”

“We aren’t being raised for slave-taking, friend. We’re raised to fight the Governor, drive the British out of Virginia.”

The taller man nodded. “Regular pay, though?”

“Regular as clockwork, friend, and paid every week. Victuals at the colony’s expense and the best of living for every soldier.”

“Save it, Sergeant. I’ve served with the milishee before, an’ so has Mr. Weymes here. No one ever offered us no bounty, though. I think we’ll sign.”

“You both have your own weapons?”

“Yep.”

“And horses?”

“You ain’t blind, is you? Them’s our horses, then.”

The other man opened his mouth and then shut it, like a fish. No noise came out for a moment, and then he opened it again.

“Our black girl runned off.”

“Pay him no mind.”

“They the milishee, Bludner. You tell ’em about our black girl, Sally.”

“We’re joining the militia, Weymes, and we’ll find her in our own spare time.”

“Make your mark, here, and here. And I’ll sign for your horses and arms.”

“I don’ have to make no mark, boyo. I can sign my name.”

Lawrence had never liked back-country ruffians, and he stood up smoothly and walked forward.

“If you want to serve in my company, keep a civil tongue in your head.”

Bludner looked at him, meeting his eye unblinking. They stared at each other for just a moment-too long, in Lawrence’s book, but not long enough to count as open defiance. Then Bludner bowed his head, a quick, jerky motion-a man who retreated before superior social position but reserved judgment.

“I’ll ax your pardon then, sir. Didn’ mean no harm. Just plain talk. I ain’t ignorant.”

On the whole, Lawrence liked him now that he had retreated. And men who could read and write were too rare. Perhaps Bludner would make a corporal; he had the skills. The little man looked like death, though, and Lawrence didn’t think he’d last long.

Virginia, October 1775

They didn’t really follow the deer tracks, as Caesar had a strong idea that the deer were headed across the little creek and up the flat ground toward the next little wooded ridge. He could neither see nor smell a cabin, and yet the fields looked like they had been tilled at one time. They might have been over-used; Caesar knew tobacco could play the soil out. But it seemed odd that Washington and others were trying to drain the Great Swamp while there was good ground like this right near the coast. It didn’t stand to reason. The red earth showed through the early fall stubble of browned grass and weeds shot through with the stillvibrant green of autumn thistle. He followed the deer by watching the ground, sometimes confirmed by bent grass and the occasional deep mark in the soft soil.

The deer had stopped suddenly; that much was plain. Caesar thought he knew why and in a moment the smell of blood and ordure made it obvious. Someone else had killed the deer, right here. Caesar suddenly felt hunted himself, down in the low ground between two ridges, and he was stooped to the ground in the dry grass before he had given it any thought. Jim flattened out beside him.

“I smell smoke.”

Caesar had scented something several times, well away to the north, carried on the wind. He wouldn’t call it smoke, just yet.

“I smell something, right enough.”

“Someone else killed our deer.”

“Like the man who owns the ground. Shush now.”

He lay still for a while as the morning passed away toward noon, and nothing seemed to move. He felt hunted, and he couldn’t lose the feeling. He had checked his priming too many times. He had to move, although his instincts were to lie low.

Or were they telling him that the threat was to the camp? He was suddenly haunted by the image of the slave-takers appearing during his fever. He couldn’t let that happen again. He raised his head, and a little eddy of breeze brought him another smell of fire.

“Somethin’ burnin’.” He nodded over the ridge. “We got to know. Stay quiet.”

He moved as quickly as he could over the rest of the autumn grass to the base of the ridge and started up it, his heart easier with cover over his head and his back. It was pure panic that led him to worry about Tom and Virgil; no one could have got round him and Jim, leastwise not with enough men to take his friends. He climbed up the ridge, his legs pumping him over fallen timber, his footsteps light on the leaves and broken branches. Jim was just as quiet. When they crested the hill, they saw a line of fires off west, less than a mile away and mostly showing as smoke in the afternoon light. Beyond the line of fires was a low ridge with cabins, tents, and brush huts, and another line of fires. As far as they could see at the distance, there were no patrols.

“Is that the governor’s army?” asked Jim. He sounded eager.

“I don’t think so. I don’t see no red coats.” It struck Caesar then that if the governor had enough redcoats, he wasn’t going to need black soldiers.

“We need to get closer.” The ridge gave an excellent vantage point of the ground to the north, and Caesar saw another, several miles away and even higher. He crept back away from the opening he had used to look north and across the summit to the south side, where he could clearly see the little creek and the small ridge where Tom and Virgil were. Then he looked out to the east, where the ground was broken by patches of cultivated land and woods. He slipped back into the cover on the north slope and lay there for almost half an hour, watching the sun angle change and the movement in the distant camp. Men came on horseback, and tiny figures moved about, although no one seemed particularly on guard.

At his feet, a tiny watercourse ran into some low ground to the northwest. Beyond that, across a few hundred yards of muddy fields, was a patch of woods, the woodlot of a small cabin well off to the west.

“Jim, you go on back to the boys and tell them to be ready to move. We’ll be going hard tonight and there won’t be no food unless they gets it themselves.”

Jim nodded soberly.

“I think that’s the militia, a whole army of slave-takers.” He nodded his head. “Gon’ make sure, and meet you back to camp.”

“I could come with you.”

Caesar smiled. He suspected that Jim could do this better than he could himself, but he couldn’t order a boy to do something like that, because Jim would do it in a flash, with no thought to the consequences.

“You could,” said Caesar, and smiled broadly, to show that he understood the boy’s point. “But you ain’t.”

He moved briskly enough down the face of the ridge and into the muddy rill of water. The brush along its bank was still green and gave good cover, but the muddy water was colder than he had expected. The bottom was mud and gravel, and as he approached the low marshy ground he found the creek bottom turned to pure mud. He sank in a hole so deep that it took him several moments and a great deal of thrashing to free himself. He crawled out into the night air, and the breeze cooled him more, so that his teeth chattered. Then he moved, crouched right down, around the marsh; he couldn’t stand to be any wetter, even if he risked detection. He crossed the open ground at a run and entered the trees with relief. Had he been more experienced in the ways of armies, he would have expected the militia to have a post in the wood to cover the rear of their camp, but his luck was in and his inexperience was shared by the summer soldiers in the camp. There was no post.

Nonetheless, men were moving on the other side of the wood. Caesar lay silent for minutes, his body heat seeping away into the damp ground, before he crawled forward a little and realized that all the movement was that of men going to and from the downed trees along the northern edge of the wood that they used as latrines. That made him smile; men are seldom at their most alert when dealing with such fundamental issues.

He crept closer. There were no sentries, but the conversation of two men using a latrine told Caesar that this was the encampment of Virginia militia. He gathered from their conversation that they had been digging trenches and that both wanted to be home getting their crops in. Mostly it was griping, little different from the daily staple of Virgil or Tom. But a third man, noisily settling himself on another downed tree, brought the real news; he had been with a patrol and seen the enemy camp-the governor’s camp-which he indicated was not too far to the north.

Caesar had a long way to go to get back to his friends. He ran across the open field, slipping twice in the mud, running as much for the warmth as for the speed. He leapt the creek and headed straight up the ridge, pulling himself up the steep slope by grabbing the smooth trunks of smaller trees in the failing light. He paused at the top, half afraid, perhaps expecting Jim with bad news, or an ambush on his back trail. He was conscious that he was going back exactly the way he had set out, a serious mistake, but he didn’t know another way and didn’t want to waste the time finding one in the gathering gloom.

Once down the other side, though, he felt free, and he was almost unwary as he began to cross the open ground to the south. The smell warned him just in time-the fresh smell of a dead animal. That deer carcass wasn’t too far away. Then he heard the movement and he froze, his fowler coming up to a line with his eye and pointed at the sound. He moved to his left, cautious now, his heart thumping away like horses’ hooves in his chest.

Wolves or coyotes. Maybe dogs. They were all bad, if they caught you alone. And his one shot might not slow them, might just bring something worse, like militia. He kept walking off to his left, the fowler tracking the tearing, rending noises. It sounded like fiends from hell ripping bodies asunder-too many for one poor deer carcass. Caesar shivered again and moved a little quicker, back to the small creek and then up the side of the ridge he’d made camp on last night. He smelled fire and thought he smelled roasting meat, which made him suspicious. He was so worried that he crawled right up on them and listened for a minute to make sure that slave-takers hadn’t left an ambush for him, but it was just Virgil griping nervously to Jim about how late he was.

He wanted to say something about the fire, but he was so cold that he needed it, and he was so relieved to see them that he wanted to hug them all. There, at the base of the last hill, with the wolves close, he had thought it might be some dreadful devil’s trick to let him hear how close they were to the governor’s army and then take his hope away. With warm tea in him and a blanket on his shoulders, he almost had to cry, but he covered it.

“Governor’s army isn’t far, friends.” He looked around at them in the flickering light of the tiny fire. “We gon’ make it tonight, or we won’ make it at all.”

They nodded. They could all see that wherever he had been, it had been a hard place-not just in the cold, but something in his face.

“I got a rabbit,” said Jim.

“How’d you do that?” asked Caesar. “I didn’t hear a shot.”

“Damn thing walked into here bold as brass, just as the light started to go. Jim gets up nice and slow, then fzzt! And he’s off after the thing.”

“Caught it, too,” said Virgil. “Never seen nobody catch a rabbit with their bare hands.”

Jim drank in the teasing praise. “You said we needed food, an’ we’d have to catch it ourselves, so I did.”

Caesar sucked the marrow out of a bone and shook his head.

“Never seen nobody catch a rabbit with their bare hands,” said Virgil again.

The moon was just rising when he started them north, even farther east than the night before. He aimed for the little ridge he had seen, but he wanted to make a big circle around the militia camp, going well east, and come back on his ridge. He had done such navigations in the swamp with mixed success, but the moonlight helped, as did the rabbit. By the time he had been moving for an hour, he was warm again. They were in the low ground where he had seen patches of cultivated land. He thought from the furrows that it was slave-cultivated, not tobacco but food. The slave cabins must be close but he hadn’t seen them and he guessed they must be further east, nestled up against an invisible plantation house. He kept moving, his little band right on his heels in Indian file.

The rabbit was just a memory by dawn. The men had been on their feet for nine hours, and they had started short on sleep. They were done. The rising sun was at their backs, as Caesar had hoped, as they moved west, aiming for the slope of what he still thought was the ridge he had spied while he watched the militia camp. He led them quickly despite their fatigue; more and more he used speed to cross open spaces instead of stealth. When they were in among the trees on the ridge’s wooded slopes, he felt as safe as he permitted himself to feel.

“We’ll get up to the top and take a break,” he said, glancing north through a break in the foliage.

“Thought we was gon’ get to the governor tonight,” Tom said.

Caesar nodded. “We didn’t. I hoped we’d find him out to the east, but he’s still north. I think I smell some smoke out there,” and he waved his arm. “I’ll go see. You stay here and rest.”

Caesar had some energy left, from some reserve he always seemed to cache away, and he left them in a hollow on the wooded ridge. He thought he could see the Chesapeake in the distance.

He was light-headed, and for a bit he just stopped and breathed, afraid that he might have the fever again. But his breathing steadied and his mind was clear, and he kept on across two fields that had been in wheat and one with corn stubble all the way across. He had to burrow through the hedges where they had been allowed to grow, and suddenly he was at the edge of a road and men were talking on the other side of the trees-white men. There were more fires, the fires he had smelled from the ridge. The hedges covered their smoke.

He slipped into the trees and crawled forward until the men were clear, backlit against their fires. He paused for a moment to think how foolish they were to put the fires behind them in the dark; but they clearly had sentries, and the fires helped him see that the sentries were soldiers in coats, and the coats were red. The local civil war was anything but straightforward, but Caesar was sure enough that men in king’s coats had to be the governor’s men. Their fires and their sentries faced the militia, a few miles away. He moved forward to the edge of the trees and watched a while as the regulars changed their pickets and shivered in the fall air. One smoked and another cautioned him about it. The sun rose higher, and as it did, Caesar saw that the relief party coming down the track behind the sentries was composed entirely of black men in sashes, all armed with muskets. Their officer was white. He relieved the regulars and his own men settled in their places. They tended to talk more, and they all smoked. The officer sat down a little to one side, almost at the edge of the track, and opened a book. Caesar began to crawl that way, moving carefully but with joy rising inside him. Those men-black men, with muskets-weren’t runaways, but black soldiers. It was all true.

He made it to the very edge of the trees, only fifty feet or so from the officer. Caesar didn’t know why it was so important to get to the officer without being caught, but he moved as slowly as he ever had in the swamp, out from the protection of the trees and on to the field of high grass, golden in the autumn sun beyond. He stopped frequently to listen; he could no longer see the other sentries without raising his head. After a long time, he thought he had gone far enough, and he lay still a moment, gathering his strength and his courage, and then he rolled to his feet. One of the sentries saw him instantly, but the officer was a little slower, or just lost in his book, and when he glanced up, he saw Caesar’s wide smile very close to him. The man showed no fear, only lowered his book.

“Good day to you, sir,” said Caesar, bowing, speaking carefully in a way he hadn’t in months.

The man laughed. “Damn, that’s civil. You a runaway?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Speak well, I’ll give you that. That your gun? You alone?” He seemed to be speaking for the benefit of someone else.

Caesar felt the sentry glide up behind him, but he held his ground and his smile.

“I heard that any slave that joined this army was free.”

“True enough.” The man looked Caesar up and down. “I’m Lieutenant Edgerton. What’s your business?”

“I want to join. There’s others with me.”

The man behind him put a hand on his shoulder.

“I know this boy,” he said.

“Very well, Sergeant King,” said Edgerton, his eyes going back to his book. “Enter him and see to his friends.”

“Yes, sir.” King smiled at Caesar and took his gun for a moment, looking at the priming and the state of the piece. Caesar stared in wonder. He hadn’t expected to see King ever again.

King was all business. “How many with you?”

“Two men and a boy.”

“Good as you?”

“They can all shoot. Even the boy.”

“We get some every day. But not many as bring their own guns, nor can shoot.”

“We’ve been in the Great Dismal.”

“I’m sure you have tales to tell. Let’s get your friends. Where ah they?”

“Over the ridge. Almost a mile.”

“You came through the milishee?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m Sergeant King. You say, yes, Sergeant.”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

“Good boy.” He turned back to the officer. “Permission to take a party of men and retrieve the rest of the recruits, Mr. Edgerton?”

“Carry on, King.” King doffed his hat, a rakish round hat with several plumes, and then turned to Caesar.

“Stay right here.”

Caesar watched as he went past the picket and came back with a group of black soldiers. Some looked clumsy with their arms; a few looked dangerous.

“Fall in the marker. You, Jonas. Right. Fall IN!” The men moved quickly into a fairly crisp imitation of the two precise ranks the regulars had used to march. King stood facing them, a big Queen Anne musket over his left arm like a sportsman.

“We ain’t tryin’ to impress the king here, boys. We’re goin’ to get a few o’ this boy’s friends, waitin’ over the hill near the milishee. So we best go fast an’ quiet, in a single file. If it comes to shootin’, you jus’ form a line an’ follow me. Got it?” Everyone nodded, although several of the clumsy men looked so nervous as to be comical.

“I forgot your name, boy.”

Caesar thought for a moment.

“Julius Caesar.”

“Very well then, Caesar. You’re the scout. Take us to them.”

Caesar’s energy was renewed, at least for the moment; he could still feel the fatigue, but it was far down and he kept it there. He loped off, moving quickly through the woods and over the fields, trying to guide the little file of soldiers through the hedges as best he could. By the time he got to the hollow at the top of the wooded ridge, it was full day. All three of his men were lying at the bottom of the hollow, unmoving, and for a moment of heartbreak he thought they were dead, but then Jim’s head came up and Tom pointed his pistol. And they saw the black men with muskets, and Tom smiled, and so did Virgil, and even Jim.

Sergeant King was looking out of the little wood down the ridge toward the militia camp.

“You’re no fool, Caesar. This is as good a watch post as I’ve seen.” Caesar thought that King had learned this new clipped way of talking from the white officer.

He told off all three of the dangerous looking men and two of the clumsy ones, and told them to observe the militia until he sent a relief. “If you ain’t heard nothin’ when the sun is at noon, you jus’ come back. If’n they attack you, jus’ come back. Otherwise, stay here and learn what you can.”

The dangerous men all nodded. Caesar went over to the largest; closer up, it was obvious he had been a sailor like King. He had tattoos all over his arms.

“There’s a trail comes up from that creek. See it?”

The man squinted, then nodded.

“They didn’t have no sentries out las’ night, neither.”

The sailor nodded at Caesar and smiled.

“Thankye.”

And then they were going back down, past the hedgerows and the fields, through the wood, past the other sentries, and farther back, through another line of guards to a field covered in gray linen canvas tents. King took them all to an officer who asked them some questions, and when they left his big white tent each of them had a shilling and a paper chit.

People stopped and looked at them because they looked so savage. Eventually this made it through their fatigue, and they began to be embarrassed. There were women in the camp, and quite a few were black, and several were bold enough to comment on Tom’s breeches, or Caesar’s.

“What’s the paper say?” asked Tom. He liked the shilling.

“It says you are a soldier in the Loyal Ethiopian Regiment,” said King, and he stopped at a firepit where a big group of black men and women were cooking. “This is your company. Listen up! These men run a long way to join, so treat ’em right. Your corporal is Mr. Peters, right here. Mr. Peters, this is Julius Caesar.” Caesar looked through his fatigue and saw a much older man, who nodded gravely.

“You lads hungry?”

They all responded.

“Well, that’s about the only good thing ‘bout being in the army.” He had a curious accent, like a very educated white man. He was only the second African Caesar had ever heard speak so well. But Caesar was beyond curiosity just then, and when a mess kitty full of salt pork and thick pea soup was placed in his hands, he didn’t stop eating until it was empty. When he raised his head, most of the men were gone, and his own three were asleep on the ground. Corporal Peters was watching him with a benign air.

“How long have you been on the run?”

“Near on six months, I think.”

“You speak well. What were you, a house slave?”

“No, sir. I was a dogs boy.”

“Those dogs must have spoke you uncommon civil, then.” The older man smiled at his own humor. “Get some sleep, lad.”

Caesar was boiling with questions, but he was safe and well fed. He let his head slide down on to a forage bag full of straw. He fell asleep there, but his right hand was still wrapped around the wrist of his fowler, and the corporal smiled at him, shook his head, and lit his pipe.

Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 8, 1775

“It is curious that you and I share a name, is it not, William?” Charles Lee was leaning against the door jamb, his coat fashionable, his hat in hand, watching Washington’s black manservant powder his hair. William Lee had the mask over his master’s face to keep the powder off and was dusting away industriously. He never could tell whether General Lee was joking or being serious, and he didn’t like the game.

“Yes, suh. Very curious.”

“Perhaps we have a parent in common, or are cousins.”

“William does not appreciate this sort of humor, General, and neither do I.” Washington spoke from under the mask. “It scarce does you credit, abusing a man who can’t answer back.”

Lee laughed his cynical laugh, two quick barks. “I think I’m perfectly civil. Inviting the fellow to be a relative ought to be taken as a compliment, I think. I certainly meant it so, Mr. Lee.”

“Thank’a, suh.”

“Think nothing of it. General, we have dispatches from General Arnold.”

Washington’s head came up eagerly, but he restrained himself as William Lee was just starting to club his hair.

“You have the advantage of me.”

“General Arnold is in good spirits and his advance guard is past the second portage to the Dead River. He’s through the worst of the high ground and well on his way to Quebec.”

Washington’s breath escaped audibly.

“We’ll take Quebec yet.”

“Please stay still, suh.”

“Sorry, Billy.”

Billy brought a freshly pressed black silk ribbon, three full inches broad, from the side table and brought it up under Washington’s heavy club of hair. He began to tie it. Washington held his head perfectly still.

“General Arnold dated this the thirteenth of October. Did I say he’s in good spirits, as are his men?”

“Does he give a return of supplies?”

“He notes near the bottom that he has provisions for twenty-five days.”

“That’s news worth hearing.”

“I took the liberty of giving the messenger a few dollars. Added to General Montgomery’s dispatches of yesterday…”

“We begin to show signs of having a winter campaign. It’s far too early to be sure, but if we can take Canada…”

“…the war is won. No Canada, no bases, no place for their navy to anchor. Yes, sir. Of course, there is Governor Dunmore in Virginia.”

“Nothing that need worry us. What do we have in the notes for today?”

“I’ll send you Captain Hamilton, sir.”

Washington’s head emerged from the mask. His hair had just one curl to each side, but was crisply clubbed at the back. The coat of silver-gray powder was exact and even and not a speck of it was on his dressing gown. William Lee helped him into his heavy blue and buff uniform. After he had his sword belt seated properly, Lee began buttoning on his heavy epaulets. Washington and Charles Lee wore virtually the same uniform, but each adorned it differently. Lee gave it an air of carefully planned unconscious elegance, while Washington lent it a spartan dignity. As Washington finished his toilette, they glanced over each other as if duelists measuring an opponent’s prowess.

“Had any thoughts on provisions?”

“Only that it’s time to make demands of the other colonies.”

“And enlistments?”

“I expect we’ll enjoy recruiting another army when this one marches away with all our equipment, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a way to avoid it.”

Washington looked pained when Charles Lee swore, but let it pass.

“I think the Connecticut regiments will stay.”

“Perhaps, sir. Are you ready for correspondence? I have to be in the saddle. The ‘line’ regiments won’t send in returns unless I bully their adjutants.”

“I would like to deal with my household, first. Ask Hamilton to wait and send me Mr. Austen.”

If Charles Lee resented acting in lieu of a butler, he stifled it, smiled a very small smile, and bowed.

“Your servant, sir.”

William Lee waited until the room was clear, then started in on his master’s neck stocks. He could trust the girls with the shirts, but stocks took a different touch.

Williamsburg, Virginia, November 8, 1775

“Make ready!”

Every man in the company held his musket barrel up by his left cheek and cocked it.

“Present!”

Every man brought his musket sharply down and aimed it across the field.

“Fire!”

Forty flints struck forty hammers and turned them over with a soft click and a shower of sparks. Most of the men immediately rotated on their heels until they were half turned to the right, and their right hands reached for their cartridge boxes. The white sergeant in the red coat walked along to one man who hesitated.

“Are ye ready to load then, lad?”

The young man instantly rotated on his heels and reached back. Other men who were slow at the drill did the same. Sergeant King stood behind the company, speaking quietly to the newest recruits in the center of the back rank, which included Tom, Caesar, and Virgil. Jim was so small he had to be in the front rank, but he was a fast study and it had been days since he had been reprimanded at drill.

“Prepare to prime and load. Handle your cartridge!” Forty hands reached in and removed a paper tube full of powder from the wooden blocks in their cartridge boxes. Less than half of them had boxes; the rest had various contraptions they had made themselves or which had been made for them by Williamsburg contractors. Then they bit off the top of the cartridge between their teeth and brought the now-open paper tube to the height of the pan on the musket’s lock.

“Prime your pan.”

Every man poured enough powder to ignite the priming into the pan and raised his fingers to the back of the cock, or frizzen.

“Shut your pan.” Every man closed the L-shaped cock over the priming pan, and…

“Cast about.”…rotated the musket smartly at a pivot formed by the swell forward of the lock, so that it was held, lock down and barrel up, in the left hand. The right still held the paper tube with the remainder of the powder.

“Charge with cartridge.” The three ranks tipped the contents of the tube and the tube itself down the barrel.

“Draw your rammers.” Every hand grasped the rammer at its iron tip and pulled as far as the arm could reach, then those same right hands moved quickly back down to the newly exposed base of the rammer and caught it there, “shortening” the rammer.

“Ram down cartridge.” The shortened rammers were drawn fully from the pipes, rotated through a half-circle so that the iron tip was in the top of the barrel, and thrust strongly home.

“Withdraw your rammers!”

“Return your rammers!”

Now every man stood with a loaded musket held tight into his left shoulder. No ball, of course. The King was sparing of his lead.

“Make ready!” Sergeant King was pushing the new recruits at the rear.

“Lock up. Lock up there, Tom.”

The white sergeant paced to the center of the line.

“Every man in the second rank should have stepped over. Every man in the first rank should be kneeling with his leg well back. Every man in the third rank should have stepped a little forward to lock up. You should be one machine, capable of delivering one fire. In battle, if the king should ever be so unlucky as to send you there, we will not be loading a step at a time. We’ll only tell you to ‘prime and load’. But this, the ‘make ready’, is the most important step if this long fellow here is not to shoot off the ear of this little fellow in the front rank. Are they ready, King?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well. Remember what I told you. Every musket comes down together. You all seem to have muscles. Use them. PRESENT!”

Thirty or so muskets came down together. Most of the back rank was too slow.

“Not good enough. Back to the make ready!..PRESENT!”

This time, the motion was, if anything, weaker than the last. The sergeant seized a musket from one of the front-rank men.

“Look, you cretins. First, I’m at the make ready. Yes? Present! One swift motion. The left arm is actually pulling the musket down. If you execute the make ready motion correctly, you will not hit your mates in front. Right. And again. Back to the make ready…PRESENT!”

It was a passable effort and would not have disgraced most companies of volunteers in England. The sergeant let it go with a head motion that showed his gentle contempt for their best effort.

“FIRE!”

The volley, fired with blank squibs, was quite crisp. He did not praise it.

“Prime and load! Quickly! Faster, you idiot! You, the long one, step over, damn you. Cover your file leader! Faster. Six, five, four, three, two…Make ready!”

Most of them got it right. The white sergeant noticed that all the new recruits in the back were on the right foot, had their bodies in the right position. Perhaps King was coaching them, but what of it?

“Present! Do you want to shoot your mate in the back, Coneyhead? Yes, you, you great gowk! Lock up! FIRE!”

He walked back to King, who was standing behind Caesar in the rear rank.

“Pretty sorry, King. But given a few years, we’ll make soldiers of the survivors.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That very tall fellow needs some, shall we say, strong measures? He’s going to be an embarrassment in the field. He’s afraid of his musket.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well then, King. Bring them along. We’re parading with the battalion in a few minutes.”

King paced out to the head of the company.

“Company will form column by wheeling to the right by subdivisions!”

A murmur in the ranks as the men who knew what this meant communicated it to the ignorant. King was wise enough to wait it out.

“By the right wheel! MARCH!”

With surprising precision, the company split in two, and each small block wheeled through a quarter-circle to stand in a column. They shuffled uncertainly to a halt. King shook his head, chagrined. He should have told them to continue marching once the wheels were performed, but he couldn’t admit it in front of the sergeant from the Fourteenth Regiment.

“At the quickstep! March!” The little column started forward.

In the rear rank of the second subdivision, Private Julius Caesar of the Loyal Ethiopian Regiment set his face and marched. His body was beginning to respond correctly to the commands, and he felt the first gleams of hope since the endless drill had started. Days of clumsy fumbling had reduced him to a deep frustration and anger, the more so as the white sergeant seemed to have no method of teaching but impatient repetition. He never called them niggers, but his contempt for them was not very well buried. He seemed to resent even having to drill them. Caesar felt it, and he knew that King and many of the others felt it, too. The drill was difficult enough without the added sting of the contempt that made every evolution seem like a test.

But as he began to master the drill, he began to understand better why it mattered. He could see how the big volleys of fire would replace the inability of most of the men to aim well, and he could feel how terrifying the volleys would be even aside from the execution they would reap. He began to enjoy drill. He also savored the changes in himself, wrought by daily exercise that included rest, good sleep, and regular food. The mattock wound in his leg was finally just a memory, and he thought he might get his speed back in time. His arms were filling out. He stood straighter than he had since the swamp. Girls looked at him when he strode by. And he wasn’t alone. Virgil seemed stronger, and Jim had gained an inch and was filling out like an animal being fattened for market. Most of them had hats, now, and their clothes were better.

Williamsburg residents still treated them like a raree show, coming to their doors or windows every time the battalion paraded there. The catcalls were mostly gone, although many of the residents made sure that every black soldier knew that they resented the arming and freeing of so many slaves. It was getting harder to find a slave in Williamsburg, and few of the middle-class families had avoided the consequence. Most of them had lost quite a bit of “valuable property”.

Caesar’s corporal, the well-spoken man, had been butler and major domo to Peyton Randolph. Other men in the ranks with Caesar had been field hands or blacksmiths or house slaves belonging to Loyalists. None had been reluctant to join the British Army to leave slavery. Governor Dunmore had hoped to raise a regiment of whites and a regiment of blacks, and the black regiment was growing faster, though it did alienate some of the white Loyalists. The whites were not coming so quickly, and the governor’s detachment of regulars and marines was stretched thin trying to cover all the possible lines and train the new recruits.

Caesar glanced under his hat and saw that they were well up the green by the governor’s palace and that two other companies of blacks were already drawn up there, as well as a detachment from the Fourteenth Regiment. Sergeant King halted them when they were aligned with the front marker of the second company.

“Company will form line from column by wheeling to the left by subdivisions.” Caesar was prepared for this, could already see the result in his mind. These maneuvers were becoming clear to him, and their purposes, though many of them seemed slower than simply telling the men where to go. It was all about harnessing and controlling the firepower of all the muskets. Caesar understood that to the marrow. He still wondered about the power of individual men aiming carefully, but so few of the blacks were trained in the use of arms that they were unlikely to make good marksmen, and observation of the white militia had suggested that they weren’t much better.

They were halted in line with the other companies. A white officer, not one he recognized, in an elegant brown velvet coat and a bright green silk sash, walked smartly to the front of the parade. He began to read from a proclamation and general order from the governor about martial law. Caesar understood it, but it didn’t seem to have much to do with him. He spent a few moments thinking about “clubbing”, or reversing the company, and why that was such a bad thing. His attention snapped back to the white officer when he coughed and his tone of voice changed.

“I do require every person capable of bearing arms, to resort to his Majesty’s standard, or be looked on as traitors to his Majesty’s crown and government, and thereby become liable to the penalty that the law inflicts upon such offences, such as forfeiture of life, confiscation of lands, and etc. And I do hereby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining his Majesty’s troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedy reducing of this colony to a proper sense of their duty, to his Majesty’s Crown and dignity.

“Three cheers for his Britannic Majesty George the Third and an end to tyranny!”

“HUZZA!

“HUZZA!

“HUZZA!”

Caesar looked at Tom, who was beaming, and at Virgil, who looked very serious indeed. Jim was too far away, in the front rank, to be reached with a glance, but Caesar could see a little of his smile tightening the skin at his temples. They were free men-and soldiers.