Washington and Caesar

1

Chesapeake Bay to Brooklyn Heights, May 20-August 29, 1776

Sergeant King returned to them, briefly. He had recovered from his wound but was almost unable to speak from the damage to his mouth, and eating was a labor. He went back to the navy immediately, stopping only to shake hands with the men who had been in his platoon. He convinced a few to join the Royal Navy.

“No bastard will treat you like they treated ye,” he said, his voice full of gravel. “Navy needs men, an’ don’ ask too close about their past or their color.”

That much was true. Both of the frigates that had waited out the winter with them in the Chesapeake were clearly short of men. The war had caught them unprepared, with peacetime crews meant for chasing foes no more dangerous than the occasional smuggler. The heavy crews that were needed to fight the great guns and sail the ship were kept only in wartime. Sailors were better paid than soldiers, and such crews were too much for the navy to maintain when there was no one to fight. The war with the colonists changed that, and the ships on the American station were taking any men they could get.

The rumors that they were bound for New York as a labor force grew to the point where Sergeant Peters, now a sick man, confessed to Caesar that if he didn’t have his wife to care for, he’d consider enlisting as a sailor himself. Mr. Edgerton took no action to stop the navy from taking his men. Indeed, he was barely visible for most of the spring, and then one day they heard he had been posted to the board of ordnance, leaving them without an officer, which seemed a dangerous development.

Caesar didn’t trust the navy. And he had had a taste of the army, and wanted to try it again. He had exercised command, and liked it. But it was more complicated than that, in his mind, and he sought to understand it all. Perhaps it was the acceptance from the Fourteenth Foot when they were about to go on to the fight at Great Bridge, just the acceptance of other men. Perhaps it was the thrill of the fight. Caesar knew he had been bred to love that in Africa. He fancied the army, and he meant to make his way in it.

The Fourteenth changed transports and went off to the Indies with the navy, bound for a different campaign. Caesar had no warning and no chance to say goodbye, but understood from the sailors that France, another great power over the water, was threatening war, and the ships and men were going south to the tropics to defend the sugar islands against them. Caesar smiled a little, to himself. He didn’t think his heart would have been in any defense of the sugar islands, even if the devils of hell had been the enemy.

They were moved to the Penelope, a transport that now held most of the remaining Ethiopians and their women, and the frigates left them, taking away the chance of freedom within the harsh discipline of the navy, and the chance of riches in prize money.

Jim, once he recovered, grew at an astounding rate. Sally had brought him food every day, whether he ate it or not, and once he was well enough to eat, the richer food seemed to extend his bones a little every day.

Willy and Paget began to creep into their circle, as the rumors flew and the treatment on board ship grew more like the treatment they had endured on land at the end. At first, Caesar kept them at arm’s length, as troublemakers, but Tonny and Virgil pleaded their case, and in time, they were allowed to sit and smoke in the section of cable tier that the group had marked down as their own. Lope stayed with them, as well. He wasn’t bright, but he worked hard, and he could sew a bit.

The Penelope, of Liverpool, was well found and relatively new, but she sagged to leeward, couldn’t sail anything like a bowline, and her captain spent much of his time drunk. The weeks wore into months and the ships remained anchored in little pools of their own filth, and Penelope’s little flaws of sailing became more obvious every time she moved to leave her waste behind her. The sailors had no animosity for the blacks, but what fellow feeling they might have shared was tempered with a lively inclination for the women the black soldiers brought with them, and only constant attention and some rumors of disease kept the situation from becoming deadly.

A bad storm would move them all out to sea to ride it out in safety, but a return to gentle weather meant back to the heat and the stench. The smell was all too familiar to the black passengers. The Penelope was coming to smell like a blackbirder, a slave ship.

Peters and Caesar maintained their authority. The mere fact that Caesar’s circle stayed together gave them an edge; they were the largest group aboard, and the toughest, and they were willing to use force to keep order. Other ships might have become floating brothels or worse, but not the Penelope. The brief southern spring gave way to summer, and the heat and stench drove past unbearable and into hellish. And still Caesar walked the decks, talking to this one and that one, keeping their spirits up, holding them to the standards they had learned from the Fourteenth, both to drill and appearance. He paraded the women every so often, looking for bruises and split lips, for pregnancy, for all the things that the British soldiers looked for when they paraded their women. The women supported him, too. Black Lese, a big woman who had been a slave in New York and spoke Dutch, became their spokesman. She was not a “good” woman like Sergeant Peters’s wife, and she cared nothing for the Bible, but she had become the mouthpiece of the women on the Penelope.

They no longer had arms, or if they did, the arms were stored in another ship, and no one troubled to tell them. So Caesar and Peters drilled the men with brooms or bits of spar that the sailors could spare, and drilled them every day, even as the heat became infernal. All the men grumbled. Most of those on board were Loyal Ethiopians, but not all; some were members of other units, or just blacks swept up in the last withdrawal from the peninsula. Peters decided early that they would all drill, and Caesar enforced this order.

Behind Peters’s easy authority and educated air, there was another, distant mentor for Caesar in his Roman namesake, whose cunning and ruthlessness began to seem natural to Caesar in the hot air of the ship, whose lessons about war were there every night when he went to read with Sergeant Peters.

Caesar was learning to quell mutiny before it came to violence, but twice he missed his moment, or someone mistook his sincerity for weakness. Both times he crushed his opponent in the darkness of the lower deck, first winning and then punishing until his point was clear. That weakness was no kindness was a lesson he learned, and perhaps over-learned, from the crushing of the Gauls. The Gauls, whom the Roman Caesar made slaves.

Caesar’s authority grew with practice until it was natural. And as it grew, he noticed that Tonny and Jim and Virgil seemed a little distant. It troubled him. The Roman Caesar never mentioned having a friend while he destroyed Gaul.

Rumor was part of daily life, but toward June the rumors flew thicker and faster. Every department seemed to have its own source of rumor and its own light to shine on possible futures. The sailors said they were going north, the soldiers maintained that they were going south, and the board of ordnance and the governor’s staff suggested that they were going to Long Island, off the port of New York. Caesar knew enough former Ethiopians who were now servants aboard the governor’s flagship to trust the latter, and began to pin his hopes on passage north to Long Island, and a summer campaign. The British Army had been defeated in Boston as in Virginia, and by the middle of June hopes among the white Loyalists as to the outcome of the war seemed to be at an all-time low. But as the Royal Navy vessels set off one by one for the south-indicating that, as far as their own service was concerned, the sailors’ scuttlebutt was as accurate as the servants’ gossip-and the little fleet broke up, Caesar watched the trash around the ship with new hope.

They finally sailed away from the Chesapeake one day in late June, almost the last ship to depart. The governor had left days before, and it had begun to seem to the blacks as if they were unwanted when the ship suddenly trembled with new life. A few more passengers came aboard, the last white Loyalists to leave Virginia, and then, at the change of the tide, the sailors moved briskly for the first time in months, sails were hoisted, and they were away. The moment they dropped sight of land the breeze cooled, and although squalls had them all in the scuppers, sick and feeble for days, the cool and the rain were a welcome relief from the endless heat and the stench of the long delay. They were away north, and were leaving behind those unspoken fears that had plagued Caesar since the wait began: that they might be abandoned or sacrificed, or simply turned ashore.

After the first few days they were all well enough, and most of the hale men joined in the working of the ship as well as they were able. There was never a shortage of hands to pull on a rope or sweep the ship, flogging the last of the blackbirder stench out of her. There was no answer for the thick weed that now clung to her below the waterline, taking whatever fine points of sailing she might have had clean away, but what human hands could do aboard they all did. The captain sobered up to do his navigation, and the ship was happy enough.

Four days off the Chesapeake they saw a strange sail at twilight and the captain doubled back, sailing along his own wake half the night and then setting a new course. The Yankees were known to have privateers out in every water and every weather, and every black man and woman aboard feared them and the necessary return to slavery that would follow capture at sea. But the captain’s simple ruse worked well enough, or perhaps there had been no threat to begin with. Either way, the morning found the horizon clear again, and so they sailed for days and days, the women sewing and singing, the men still busy at their drill or helping with the work of the ship.

On a Sunday early in July, they sailed into the great anchorage at Sandy Hook off Long Island, coasting into the midst of the greatest fleet any of them had ever seen, even the sailors aboard who had served in the last war. Through repeated hails they found the governor’s ship, and came alongside long enough to report their presence. None of the blacks ever found the reason why their own Penelope had lingered so long, if there was a reason at all. But the great fleet brought hope to every Loyalist, black and white, that the king would not be defeated, that they would be upheld. For the whites, it suggested the possibility of the return of their property, and for the blacks, the hope of liberty.

On the third of July, the fleet landed troops on Staten Island, and Caesar and the remnants of the Ethiopians received their first taste of their new role in the army; they were dispatched ashore to dig entrenchments. It was easy work; there was no opposition, and the ground was soft after it had been broken up by picks. Despite the separation of the work from the drill under arms that constituted the “art of war”, Caesar and all the Ethiopians set to it with a will. It offered a change from the cramped quarters of the ships, and they received their first pay since the last parade in Williamsburg, many months before. They were not paid to date; few soldiers were, but the existence of any pay at all at least confirmed that they were not slaves.

They dug under the supervision of officers from the engineers, a different breed from the other British officers they had met. Engineers were men who went to a difficult school in England. They did not purchase their commissions like other officers, but won them after long study in mathematics and gunnery. Peters and Caesar both came to the commanding engineer’s notice quickly, because they could read and write, and Peters could do mathematics. Jim had stuck to his drawing, at least as long as they had been on board Mr. Harding’s ship; he was also learning geometry from Peters. Murray, the senior engineer, had them copy his notes every day and read them back, as well as using their skills to get more out of the men. He complimented them absently (as if unaware that men needed such praise to get on with work) but mentioned the unit in his daily reports to the commander, Lord Howe.

The rebel army made no attempt to contest Staten Island, and soon afterwards, Lord Howe’s brother, the admiral, arrived at Sandy Hook with more ships and more men. There were so many vessels that Sandy Hook appeared a bare pine wood floating on the sea, with branches and trees as far as the eye could see. The Ethiopians went back to their ship, their ranks enlarged by some few Staten Island blacks they had liberated from farms there. A few spoke only Dutch, and Black Lese had to translate for them. Their odd words and overdone facial expressions gave them a comic air, but they dug as well as other men, and Peters placed them under Virgil to learn the basic drill, although few of the former Ethiopians really expected to see arms again. It was rapidly becoming a rite of passage, that all the men knew how to perform the manual.

The armed sloop Tryal, anchored next to them, began to invite visitors to their drill, and it became part of the spectacle of the fleet. Sometimes officers would come and watch, as amused by the sight of black men at drill as they would have been by a bear dancing or other frolics that seemed to go against the natural order. But they drilled anyway, and gambled, and dreamed of ways to spend their pay.

After a few days, the Tryal and some larger frigates dropped down the river past the rebel posts there, and there was firing for several hours. Royal Navy ships around them beat to quarters, but they never knew what the purpose of the maneuver was, unless simply to strike confusion and terror in the king’s enemies.

It was the middle of August before they showed any signs of disembarking again; most of the army lived in camps on Staten Island, but the Ethiopians were kept aboard their ship. It was cleaner, in the cooler air of Sandy Hook, the breezes were more frequent, and the spirits of the men and women aboard were higher than they had been in the Chesapeake. They waited. They watched the preparations, witnessed the arrival of Sir Henry Clinton’s force that had failed to take Charleston in the south, watched the seaborne skirmishes up the river and the attack by the rebels with fireships on HMS Rose and the Tryal. No one seemed to know why they were waiting or for what.

On the 21st of August, everything began to move. Peters received orders through the former governor of Virginia that the “black pioneers” would be wanted with the advance column, and they were issued tools and forage bags-but no arms. They disembarked amongst strangers who paid them no regard. No one exchanged remarks with them, or treated them as comrades. They were placed in the middle of the grenadier column, with the baggage.

It was not an auspicious start to his second campaign, but Caesar watched it all with anticipation. The grenadiers were magnificent in their fine uniforms, taller than the average soldier, and older, deadly. They performed the motions of the manual with an air of efficiency that was different from the mere expertise he had become used to with the Fourteenth. The grenadiers appeared to him to be hard men, practiced at war. He longed to be one of them. They ignored him. The army prepared to march to war on Long Island.

And the Loyal Ethiopians, those who were left, were carrying only picks and shovels.

New York City, July 9, 1776

The enemy had come.

At first, when he had sat in New York, listening to the news of disaster from Canada, Washington had begun to fear that he had guessed incorrectly, and that Lord Howe had taken the British regiments out of Boston and used them to defeat Arnold and Montgomery at Quebec. Then it became possible that they had gone to Halifax, and from there would move to Rhode Island, or the Carolinas, or even into the Chesapeake. They controlled the sea, and they could go anywhere, and he sat in New York with all the army he could muster save those regiments he sent to repair the disaster in the north, watching and waiting, hoping that the enemy chose New York and not some other, defenseless morsel of the great coast he had sworn to defend.

He sent his best generals away, to support the other theaters of war, just as he had expected in January. Charles Lee was off to the south, to defend Charleston and direct the southern war. Horatio Gates and John Sullivan were both off to the north to take commands against Guy Carleton, who had already eaten several generals, capturing some and breaking others. Carleton had held Quebec all winter. He was cutting through the Continental forces like hot iron through snow, driving the remnants of the northern army all the way from Quebec to Sorrel.

And all Washington could do was to sit near New York, building and training his army as he had in the siege of Boston. It was ironic that he had opened the war with the siege of the British Army, and now bid fair to stand a siege himself.

He worked, and worried, changed his staff, appointed new officers, wrote regulations, and worried more. He and Charles Lee had guessed that the enemy had to take New York. In the moments after victory at Boston, it had seemed obvious, but now, in light of the other news, it appeared an irresponsible guess. He had built an army. He had raised a corps of officers in his own image, who believed in discipline. He had given them a body of regulations and a manual of arms, and he had created a staff and a series of systems to govern the army, feed it, provide recruits for its continuance.

And then the first sails were sighted, and soon hundreds of masts appeared off Sandy Hook. He had caught a tiger. And now his army would fight.

He read through the day’s reports, noted with moderate surprise that the enemy was digging in on Staten Island, and called for the day’s general orders, written out fair by Colonel Reed, the adjutant general. Only one thing was wanting for the army, besides wagonloads of new equipment, and that was a spirit different from mere rebellion, which Washington privately abhorred. Rebellion would lead individual men to rebel, which was not his purpose.

Colonel Reed had written the orders well. Desertion would now be punished with thirty-nine lashes on the bare back, a sufficient punishment to deter the casual deserter; there were new regulations on obtaining passes for soldiers wishing to travel or visit nearby towns, and an order to provide chaplains for the regiments that did not possess them. Then he came to the meat of the day’s orders, whose meaning would change the army and the whole nature of the war. Washington had a draft of the original document by his elbow, and he had read it with growing delight, the magical words expressing precisely the steps which had led him to war. Once it was read to the troops, they would know exactly what the stakes were in this war, and it would no longer be a mere matter of rebellion.

The Continental Congress, impelled by the dictates of duty, policy and necessity, having been pleased to dissolve the Connection which subsisted between this Country, and Great Britain, and to declare the United Colonies of North America, free and independent States: the several brigades are to be drawn up this evening on their respective Parades, at Six O’clock, when the declaration of Congress, showing the grounds and reasons of this measure, is to be read with an audible voice.

Washington cleaned the nib of his quill on a rag, dipped it, and wrote carefully at the bottom of Reed’s copperplate.

The General hopes this important event will serve as a fresh incentive to every officer and every soldier, to act with Fidelity and Courage, as knowing that the peace and safety of his Country depends (under God) solely on the success of our arms: and that he is now in the service of a State, possessed of sufficient power to reward his merit, and advance him to the highest honors of a free country.

George Lake mustered his men quickly enough and fell in on the parade. Neither of the drummers who had replaced Noah had the spirit or the strength of wrist to beat any call as loud as Noah had, and the muster now involved the corporals racing about the camp yelling for their men, and the sergeants going to their place on parade and yelling for the company to be brought to them. George missed Noah. He had made them a better company. In his absence, they had lost some hard-won skills, like the ability to load and fire volleys to the drum. Noah had had some peculiar mixture of skill and intelligence that allowed him to listen to the sergeants and officers and beat the order just fast enough to allow the best fire.

Lake thought of Noah often, because he now had to contend with Bludner every day. Bludner was very much in command of the company. Mr. Lawrence mustered them, and stood at the front during inspections and reviews, but it was Bludner who set the tone. Lake missed the skill that McCoy had exercised, and the attention to detail, but most of all, he missed the distance McCoy had placed between himself and the other men. And he knew that Bludner had driven McCoy out as surely as he knew that McCoy had nothing to do with the loss of Noah. Bludner was friendly with the other back-country men, and no friend at all to the other apprentices.

Despite which, Lake continued to serve as a corporal and knew he was being considered for sergeant. He was smart, smarter than Bludner, and he only needed experience. He read everything he could find, borrowed manuals from officers in other companies, used his pay in Philadelphia to buy books. His section looked smart and drilled well, and they were often the first on parade. This evening, for instance, he’d taken the precaution when morning orders were read to tell them off and ask them to “lie handy” for a six o’clock formation, and they had.

Walters and Miller still had a lot of baby fat in their faces, and Miller still used a fowler from home that couldn’t carry a bayonet, but every one of his men had a cartridge box and a bayonet strap, even if Miller and Neldt lacked bayonets. Their hats were cocked just so, and they looked like soldiers. That could not be said for every man in the company.

The company fell in gradually, a section at a time, a few men running up late, and they were no longer the sharpest company in their battalion, as they had been before Philadelphia. Other officers worked their men harder, or perhaps had better drummers and sergeants. Either way, the battalion formed with the brigade, and Captain Lawrence, who was serving his turn as brigade major, stepped to the center of the parade with grave steps.

“Shoulder your firelocks!” he called, and they did, in passable unison, twelve hundred muskets going to twelve hundred left shoulders.

“Attention. General Washington has directed that the following be read at the head of every brigade.” He looked around, cleared his throat, and held a piece of paper before him.

“When in the course of human events…”

It took several minutes to read, and muskets quickly get heavy, but no one noticed, so solemn was the moment. No one grumbled in the ranks, or demanded to be allowed to go back to the order. No one made jokes. They stood together at attention as the powerful words flowed over them, until the very end.

Captain Lawrence rolled the papers crisply and looked from left to right along the front of the brigade.

“Three cheers for the Continental Congress and the Independence of the United Colonies! And let them hear you in Philadelphia!”

He raised the hand with the papers, and the first cheer rang out over the parade.

“HUZZAH!

“HUZZAH!

“HUZZAH!”

Long Island, August 29, 1776

John Julius Stewart was a short man, and no one who had not seen him in action would call him graceful or even handsome. His red hair was thick, but it wouldn’t stay in a queue, and his features were snubbed, as though someone had pushed his face against something hard before they were set. His wide-set green eyes were too large for fashion, and gave him a faintly comical air. His limbs were too long for his trunk, and he never seemed to have gotten around to learning the use of them: long legs that he stuck out at odd angles, long arms that his tailor couldn’t really conceal.

But it was the hair that his vanity hated most, and it was his hair that generally got the most attention from various dressers, though to little effect until he met Jeremy.

Jeremy had received every boon of nature denied to his master. He was as handsome as a Roman statue, proportioned aptly, so that, though he stood an inch less in height than his master, people who had met them in London or on a hunt remembered the man as towering over the master. Jeremy had brown eyes and carefully straightened dark hair that always sat perfectly on his head. In fact, it was the experience of dressing his own hair and his family’s that prepared him for the struggle of his new master.

John Julius had no more been born to the aristocracy than Jeremy had been born to service. John Julius Stewart was the son of a prosperous Edinburgh merchant, and had been to Smyrna and Alexandria before he was fifteen. His father had packed him off to the army lest he run away to sea. Being an officer made him a gentleman, though his mercantile connections ensured a certain number of sneers.

Jeremy’s father ran a prosperous and fashionable grocers in London. As a boy he had gone away to serve the Earl of Linsford’s lovely, silly wife. She had a passion to have a black boy, and treated Jeremy more as a pet than a servant. He first loved, then resented it, but he received the best education possible, as well as an accent and a set of manners that couldn’t be learned in any other school. In fact, he had more breeding than his master, which John Julius readily owned. Of course, when the pretty plump black boy became a young man, the lady was done with him. Black men were not the beau ideal of society; besides, his apparent age served all too well as a reminder of her own.

Jeremy went home for a while, but home was a difficult, cramped place after an estate and a series of grand London houses. His mother and father seemed a little vulgar, his peers simple or just low. He had no way to make a living, nor any particular interest in learning one, and black men who could fence and write verse were not as much in demand as he had hoped. Despite his father’s desire that he follow in the shop, he had chosen service as the best of a bad set of options, and had looked for a military man. His former mistress’s husband had been a colonel of militia; the pageant had fascinated him, and so had the toys.

The two men shared a passion for popular novels, a knowledge of the military sports, and a hope for adventure. Jeremy looked around the tiny bedroom of their marquee with satisfaction, enjoying the rustic comforts of the folding beds, the padded close stool and the campaign desk. A curtain of linen canvas separated the bedroom from the tent’s sitting room, where his master might have his brother officers for a glass of brandy or a cup of chocolate or coffee. Jeremy had a proprietary air toward the marquee, which he had earned by supervising its manufacture according to a French book on castramentation that he had found in a London bookseller when they were making up their equipment. It was the best furnished in their regiment, which gave them both a great deal of quiet satisfaction.

When the regiment left England to take the field in earnest, several of the more aristocratic officers who had given Stewart to understand that his position as a Scot and a merchant’s son was very low indeed, had quit the regiment, exchanging with officers who sought active service. Those who stayed were either more tolerant or simply quiet.

The Edinburgh merchant’s son had one thing most of them lacked-ready money. He used it carefully, and without too much display, and bought a vacant captaincy in the light company, the regiment’s scouts and skirmishers, and good horses and weapons. Jeremy saw to their comforts; he ordered the tent and the desk and the beds. The four good chairs in the sitting room had been “acquired” by a patrol of the light company, and had probably adorned a local house.

“I left Evelina on your bed, Jems.” The touch of the Scot was still there, although London had removed a great deal of it.

“Sorry, sir?”

“Evelina! The book we heard so much of on the ship. Don’t be wooly-headed, Jems, there’s a good fellow. Remember Lieutenant Burney?”

“I do, sir. A naval gentleman. He was out with Cook.”

“Just so.”

“And knew the Tahitian, Odiah.”

“More to the point, Jems, he has a sister.”

“Who writes. Yes, sir. My pardon, I don’t know where my head was at. Miss Burney, who writes.”

“Just so. Her first is on the bed, called Evelina. A novel of very deep sensibility.”

“Are you finished, then?”

“Oh, yes. I had it off Waters. He recommended it, and I dare say I devoured it.”

Jeremy found the little brown volume, still only paperbound, with the covers curled and many pages bent. He sniffed at it-horse sweat. Most things smelled of horse, lately. Horses had a handsome aroma anyway.

“Did you get us any mail while I was off, Jems?”

“Yes, sir. Two from Miss McLean.”

“Give, you criminal!”

Jeremy walked to the little door between the tent’s two rooms and poked his head around.

“They’re on your hat.”

The hat, a small and fashionable bicorn trimmed in the regimental manner and boasting a spray of cock’s feathers, was the sole ornament of the tent’s central piece of furniture, a camp table. Tucked upright in the stiff Nirvenois back of the hat were two letters in travel-smeared outer envelopes.

“Ahh!”

Jeremy smiled and muttered “just so” as he went back to tidying the bedroom.

“I’d like to get a piece of Turkey carpet to put in here, sir.” Requests put during one of Miss McLean’s letters were apt to be granted.

“Jeremy, when this army moves, we have to move all this, you know.”

“We have bhat horses and baggage allotment.”

“Jeremy, trust a man who’s at least chased the odd smuggler in Ireland. When we move, half this stuff will vanish never to be seen again, and by the time we see action we’ll be sleeping in greatcoats and drinking soldiers’ tea.”

“I can get one for a shilling or two, sir.” Patiently, because John Julius did not always know what was in his own best interest.

Jeremy had not expected to like his employer. He would have left a man he detested or who misused him. When he applied to be valet to a merchant’s son with manners to match, he had not expected humor, or tolerance, or a master willing to be a student in the arcane arts of the culture of the upper class. If John Julius Stewart had any flaws, they were the flaws of idleness. He seemed to have no temper at all, he didn’t fight duels, and his taste in women seemed entirely limited to just one, Miss McLean, a daughter of property and gentility in the wilds of Scotland. And Stewart had much to teach: he was a superb horseman, a crack shot, and had other skills that seemed, like the blades of a folding knife, to appear when wanted and then vanish, never to be hinted at. On board the naval ship that had carried them to America, he had endeared himself to the officers by knowing the names of every line and spar, a rare feat for a passenger and rarer for a redcoat.

When the regiment was ordered for American service and he had secured command of the light company, they had located cloth and tailors, and had every man in a dark blue watch cloak before the ship sailed, a little miracle wrought by hard guineas and Stewart’s merchant knowledge. These were the things at which Mr. Stewart excelled.

“Don’t start the book until my hair’s done, Jems.”

“Sorry, sir.” He had been looking out of the little window formed by dropping the wall of the tent a fraction, watching the dragoons at drill on the hillside above the camp. He picked up the leather sack that held his hair tools and pushed through the canvas drapes to the other room.

John Julius was sitting in the tent’s most comfortable chair, reading from a leather-bound book. His unruly red hair was unbound and unbrushed, all over his face and somewhere down his back. It gave him the comic air of a threepenny-opera pirate. His robe de chambre was pulled over his regimentals; he had risen early to ride the rounds as he had been duty officer the night before. Jeremy rubbed his hands together, hard; they were cold, although it was just July. America was cold.

He brushed the hair with quick, practiced flicks of his wrist, working the eternally tangled ends apart.

“You were riding in the wind without even tying it back.”

“Don’t be a shrew,” said Stewart with a little show of temper.

“Just reach the ribbon round and tie it back! It can’t be that hard.”

“It was dark.” It was a terrible excuse, and they both knew it. A tiny skirmish in a long war that had started with his sisters and mother and would, Jeremy thought, eventually be continued by Miss McLean.

When the strands were well separate, he began to pull the brush through to stretch the hair. Every so often, he would use hot tongs to straighten it, although that was a major labor.

“I have to take the company out past the lines today. Bit of a probe this afternoon. I’ll expect you along.”

“Most pleased, sir.”

“We didn’t beat them as badly as I thought, the other day. Their marksmen are quite active.”

“Yes?”

“Phillips, from the Forty-third? You remember him?”

“I don’t believe I’ve had the honor of his acquaintance, sir.”

“Horseman. Tall fellow…never mind. But he caught a ball. They hold a little wood in front of their lines, and post their infernal marksmen there. I’m going to wait for the afternoon sun and drive them out.”

“I look forward to it. Honored, most pleased.”

“Yes, I expect you are. Horse, pistols with new flints.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I say, no powder, I think.”

Jeremy nodded, which was Jeremy’s way of conveying that he had never, at any time, considered using hair powder on a day of active duty. Then his lips curled a little, a very slight smile. A servant’s smile.

“Right, sir. New flints and no powder in the pistols.”

“Damn you, sir, you know what I mean.”

“Please don’t move, sir. It makes all this even harder.”

Jeremy whipped most of his master’s hair together in a queue and tied it off with a strip of leather.

“Which hat, sir?”

“Hmmm. The good hat, I think.” John Julius Stewart wanted to fight in his best, a habit shared by most of his compatriots.

Jeremy reached into the brazier and tried the heat of his crimping irons. Then he rolled a side curl with a practiced finger, placing it low enough that John could wear his hat in comfort, and set it, the smell of burning hair filling the tent. He set the other to match and dodged around to the front to check that they were even. When he was satisfied, one of the curls had slipped a touch and had to be redone, but its position was established and the rest was easy enough. Then he went back to the queue, releasing it from its little leather tie and brushing it out again, the tie held in his mouth. When it satisfied him that it looked something like fashionable hair, he spat out the tie, wrapped it as tight as he could and tied it off, then covered the leather with good black silk, bound the queue all the way down as the regiment required, and tied it off. The result was very good indeed, although it took quite a while. John Julius simply continued to read, with the obligatory grunts and cries of pain whenever his hair was pulled.

Jeremy picked up the hand mirror and held it so that his master could see most of the result.

“Splendid! Doesn’t look like my hair at all.”

“Sir.”

“Right. I’m off to see the adjutant about next year’s coat issue. I left you some money in the drawer; see that the bhat-man has new forage for the horses and so on, and meet me in the horse lines at one.” He pulled out his silver watch, glanced at it, and looked up. “Pass me the time?”

Jeremy pulled his watch out by the fob, opened the case and listened, then took a silver key and wound it several turns.

“I have a quarter past eight.”

“And I the same. Thank you, Jeremy.”

He took his best hat off the table, waved farewell, and pushed through the front flap.

Jeremy went back to his bed, picked up his master’s greatcoat, and returned to the sitting room in time to hand it over as John shoved back through the flap.

“Horse lines at one, sir.”

“Just so.”

Brooklyn Heights, New York, August 28, 1776

“Dig, you bastards!” Captain Lawrence stood in the open and bellowed at his men.

George Lake was too tired to resent the insult. The shovel twisted in his grasp, his hands were so numb they could barely close on the wooden grip, and the cold rain kept on falling. Out in the long green fields below them, the British skirmishers could just be seen, moving casually as if they expected no resistance.

No resistance was about what they had received, at least from George’s standpoint. His company had been hurried across the river to Long Island when it became clear that a major action was brewing. But they hadn’t seen any action; they had simply marched back and forth for two days and then become part of the broken army streaming back into the trench lines on the Brooklyn Heights. Perhaps General Washington knew why they had lost the battle without any of them ever firing a shot, but it was a mystery to Lake.

Someone had been shooting, though. They had seen the casualties when they came across the river, piled in boats. Some men had turned white; some had feigned nonchalance. George had just been sorry-sorry that so many had been lost, and later, sorry that they had been lost for so little. There was a rumor that Washington had had to sacrifice his best regiment, Smallwood’s Marylanders, and that they had all been killed. Other men said that the German mercenaries killed every man they caught, and took no prisoners. Rumor was rife, and their company was digging alongside men from New England and Pennsylvania who had lost their regiments, lost their way, and been rallied by whatever officer caught them first.

George plunged the shovel into the mud again and scooped it full, then threw his cast on to the low rampart that was being formed by the upcast of the ditch. The ditch was spotty, shallow, and wouldn’t hide a man, and the upcast didn’t help much. George knew men were slipping away whenever Lawrence wasn’t looking. Most of those leaving were from other regiments, but a handful were their own comrades from Virginia, and their treason made George’s heart burn.

Bludner dug next to George. He was better at it, and tougher; George had to admit that. Weymes, his partner, wielded a pick, breaking the ground so that Bludner’s shovel could bite deeper. George watched them for a moment, watched their detachment and their competence. He hated Bludner, was sure the man had sold the drummer as a slave or killed him, despised his backwoods arrogance. But there was a great deal about the man to admire. He tended to get the job done.

“Here, then, Mr. Lake,” said Bludner, swinging another scoop of mud over his shoulder. “Get a mate to break the ground for you, like Weymes.” He didn’t sound exhausted, just conversational, as if digging in the rain was an everyday part of life.

Lake turned to one of his men. “Get a pick. In fact, get five picks. Form teams. Watch Bludner and Weymes.”

“Where the hell have they been, they don’t know how to dig?” asked Weymes, contemptuously.

“Town boys, Weymes. They never had to dig no cellars. Don’t mind them, Weymes. They want to learn, mostly.” Bludner spat, wiped his hands to get a better grip, and dug again. His hands were hard as rock, even in a downpour; Lake, that leader of the “town boys”, would probably be bleeding in a few hours. That didn’t bother Bludner, especially, although now that it looked to come to a fight, he worried that he would have to depend on the likes of Lake to cover his flank.

“Will you look at that?” asked Weymes, and pointed away over the fields to the south.

The British skirmishers were firing into a wood to the left of their front. The wood seemed to be held by their own Continentals; a sharp fire came back. But it wasn’t the deadly little skirmish that occupied Weymes; it was the column of black men moving up the track, well to the rear of the British skirmishers. Even in the rain, Weymes could spot a black man at a great distance.

The black men walked up to a spot where several enemy officers were standing. They wore various coats, one red, one blue, another green, and Bludner had no idea what that meant, but soon enough, the black men spread out and started digging.

“Sergeant Bludner, shall I send you down a hammock?” Lawrence’s voice carried very well.

“Sir, there’s movement on our front, I think. See that clump o’ officers? An’ then the blackies? That’s new.”

There was a stir behind Lawrence, and then a whole party of mounted men came over the ridge and right among them, all in a rush. Some of the digging men were alarmed, thinking for a moment they were under attack. Lake couldn’t see for a moment and a sense of panic was communicated to him by the men around him, but when he wiped his eyes he could see that it was a group of officers. The leader had to be General Washington: he was tall, and his horse was white.

Captain Lawrence didn’t lose a minute in communicating his own name, or that his men were the general’s fellow Virginians. Washington looked at them, digging in the rain, which was slacking off.

“Were you in action yesterday, Captain?”

“No, General.”

Washington didn’t dismount; he just sat on his horse and watched the British for a few moments.

“Just as I thought. Colonel Reed, send to General Mercer and the Flying Column at once.”

“Sir?”

“I believe that the British intend to take our defenses on Brooklyn Heights by regular approaches, by digging. Look at the arrogance of that work! It’s being constructed in our faces.”

Another officer shrugged.

“They know we have just lost our guns, General.”

Sergeant Bludner tugged at Lawrence’s sleeve. “I’d wager we could bust up their digging some, if you gave me a free hand.”

Lawrence nodded at him, and then stepped in closer to stand at the general’s stirrup. “They just started work, sir. We still have men in that wood to the left. I don’t know whose they are.”

“Riflemen, from Pennsylvania,” said the tall man who looked like Washington except his horsemanship was not of the same order. “I’m Joseph Reed, the general’s adjutant.”

“George Lawrence, of the Virginia Regiment.”

Washington didn’t appear to be paying them any attention. He had a telescope out now, and was watching the black men dig. They were digging fast. They were digging a great deal faster than these Virginians, and that annoyed him.

Lawrence pressed on with Reed, since Washington didn’t seem interested.

“That party of officers came an hour back and ran ropes. Just before you came, the blacks showed up with tools and the officer in the red coat.”

“He’s an engineer.” Reed spoke softly.

Lawrence stopped and looked.

“How can you tell?”

“Black facings, but not from the Sixty-fourth Regiment. You’ll know them all soon enough. He came up with the tools. Ipso facto, an engineer.”

“And the other men, sir? The officers in the colored coats?”

Washington looked down at Lawrence and smiled.

“I’ll wager the man in the blue coat is General Howe. He’s dressed for hunting. Odd time of year for a hunt, but I honor his spirit.” The telescope went back to the black men, swept back and forth while he measured the pace of their digging, and then froze for a moment. His face darkened with an angry flush. Colonel Reed, aware that something was wrong, turned from Lawrence and rode up to him.

“General?”

“I must be mistaken.” The general wiped the lens of his telescope carefully with a cloth and then closed it sharply. When Reed leaned forward again, he just shook his head.

Lawrence waved his hand at the woods.

“We could send a patrol to rough up their diggers, sir. Down the ridge and through the woods.”

“I will inform your brigadier, then. Do it as soon as seems best, Captain. Bring me some prisoners. I want to know why those blacks are digging. Are they slaves?”

“They sure dig fast, for slaves.”

“You are Virginian, Captain?”

“Yes, General.”

“Where are you from, Captain?”

“Norfolk, sir.”

“Lawrence, you say?”

“My father ships tobacco in a small way, sir.”

“Of course. Carry on, then, Captain.” He raised his voice. “I look for strong action from my Virginians.”

Lake had considered falling the men in, but the digging seemed more important. He watched Washington every moment he could, though. If the cause were in tatters, no one had told General Washington; he was neat and shaved, his hair tight, his clothes clean. He looked confident, and as he gathered his staff, his eye seemed to catch every man in their company for a moment.

George hoped he would say something, but he simply rode by them, watching them. And then he smiled a little, his lips thin, wheeled his horse, and rode away.

“Well, boys, looks like we ain’t done yet.” George watched the general ride off with satisfaction.

Lawrence and Bludner asked for volunteers, and the whole company clamored to come, so when their ditch was just tenable, he let them have an hour to rest and clear their muskets, and then they started down the slope in Indian file, one man at a time with a few feet between men. They angled well over to get in behind the wood from which friendly fire continued to come in spurts. The British hadn’t tried to take it and gave it a wide berth, suggesting that Colonel Reed had been right; the men within did have rifles, which could kill at a much longer range than the typical smoothbore musket.

They made it to the base of the slope without attracting undue notice, and moved quietly to the rear of the woods. Captain Lawrence, at the front of the column, exchanged some sign with the men in the woods and then they moved on among the trees. It was a woodlot like those any farmer might have kept at home, big old trees and some new growth. Lake halted with his section at the base of a large tree that grew like a tower in the middle of the wood.

He could smell the powder that the riflemen were firing from just a few yards away, and the distant replies of a few British skirmishers. A tall thin man in a linen hunting shirt and a small gorget stepped forward and took Lawrence’s hand.

“We’ve pushed them back almost half a mile. Of course, they can push us out any time they like if they are willing to pay the price.”

“General Washington asked us to disperse the men digging, there.”

Down the rank from Lake, Weymes looked slyly around him. The movement caught Lake’s eye, and he listened as Weymes muttered to the man next to him, another back-country man.

“Gon’ take some of they diggers for oursel’s,” he wheezed, and laughed. The other man laughed as well. Lake thought it typical of men like Weymes that they saw the war in terms of their own profit.

Bludner slipped out from under Lawrence’s eye and moved along the ranks to Lake. He paused a moment, looking at Lake as if judging him, and smiled a little. It was a threat, and Lake hardened himself to keep his head up and look directly at the man. Bludner moved past him, down the line of men to Weymes.

“Take a dozen men-not Lake’s. Go along the draw an’ get in behind that little fort. When they diggers make to run, you take ’em and drive ’em back to me.”

“M’pleasure,” rasped Weymes.

Up at the head of the column, the rifle officer leaned back and laughed at something Lawrence had said.

“What, them blackamoors? Have at ’em. We’ll cover you. I don’t think the British have much else here right now. I take it they are digging a fort?”

“That’s what the general thought.”

“So it will only get harder to get at ’em.” The rifle officer took out a little antler whistle and blew it, then waved his men to the left of the wood, away from where the Virginians were going out. The rain had nearly stopped.

Lake heard a wet pop next to his head and Ben Miller, the man next to him, sighed and seemed to burst, red spray everywhere. It was so fast that George wasn’t able to sort out the order of events. He didn’t hear the shot, either. George had never seen a man shot, and neither had most of the other men in the company. Ben Miller was one of his own men, someone he had cooked with and yelled at for losing the mess pot.

“Damn, you Virginnies is plain unlucky. We haven’t lost a man all day.” One of the riflemen was slumped under another tree, smoking. He didn’t seem very concerned. He inhaled deeply, looked at one of his mates, a short man in a dirty linen shirt. “Plain unlucky.”

The Pennsylvania voice and the flat pronouncement stayed with Lake.

Bludner appeared, his face red with exertion. “Face front. He’s dead, and nothing we do is going to help him. We’ll get his equipment on the way back.”

The rifle officer nodded.

“Come on, boys, let’s help these Virginny boys get the blackamoors.”

“You boys sure you’re tough enough to take some unarmed black folk?” asked another of the riflemen. He didn’t sound mean, just spoke flat, but Bludner bristled. Lawrence pushed Bludner forward, past the riflemen.

“Check your prime,” called Lawrence. He gave them a minute to check it and replace it if the last of the rain had turned it to sludge.

“Form front when we pass the edge of the wood. Eyes front…march!”

Brooklyn Heights, New York, August 28, 1776

Jim saw them first, as the rain slackened off, coming from the little patch of woodland that they knew was full of rebels with rifle guns. They all looked off that way from time to time, because there had been shooting in the morning. They were covered in sweat, despite the rain and the cool breeze, but they had a good trench and the upcast was getting to be three feet high. Already, a man swinging a pick in the trench had nothing to fear from a rifleman, no matter how proficient. The knowledge of the rifle guns had helped them dig. So had the quick praise of the engineer, Mr. Murray.

“Rebel soldiers comin’. They fo’min reg’lar like, an’ I think they comin’ fo’ us.”

Caesar could see that Jim’s words were lost on the engineer, and he swung out of the ditch where he was working, took in the approaching soldiers for himself, and turned to where Sergeant Peters was writing for the officer.

“Enemy coming, sir. A full company, if I may.” He was quite proud of both the tone, and the sentence. Calm and soldierly.

The officer stood up from his stool, handed Peters his lap desk, and ran forward to where he could see over the scarp and down the hill.

“We’re buggered,” he said. “Where the hell are the dragoons we were promised?”

His lone soldier, a corporal of the Sixty-fourth light company, spoke up hesitantly.

“My company is the other side of the woods, sir,” he reminded the engineer.

“Not the same as dragoons, lad, but fetch them. Leave that musket. You won’t need it, and we may.”

The soldier shucked his cartridge box, bayonet belt, and musket. The engineer scribbled him a note and he ran off. He was fast, Caesar noted. Not as fast as Caesar himself, but Caesar had other plans. He walked over to the engineer and grasped the musket.

“I’m a fair shot, Mr. Murray.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I’m called Caesar. I fought in Virginny, for the king.”

Murray smiled, given the situation, at the tall black man’s earnestness.

“I’m sure you did him credit, too. Now show me. Show me, and be quick about it.”

Caesar put on the cartridge box and reached back, taking a paper cartridge in his fingers and biting off the base, priming the pan and then ramming the whole cartridge, ball, paper and all, down the clean gun. You couldn’t load that way with a dirty or foul gun. Murray could see immediately that he knew his business. Sergeant Peters folded the camp desk closed and began to run to the edge of the trench. He was smiling at Caesar.

Caesar stepped down into the trench and placed the musket to his shoulder. He raised his head above the upcast, found the target, and fired. The flint snapped down hard and the trigger pull and the flat bark of the big musket were simultaneous. Caesar had never fired at soldiers formed in a line before, and it was easy. There was a body lying on the ground and a little disturbance. He smiled.

Rifle fire sounded from the woods below him, and one shot actually creased his scalp. It made him leap and sit suddenly in the ditch. Tonny laughed. None of them noticed that one of the rifle balls had gone through Sergeant Peters’s chest.

Caesar looked right and left.

“Keep your tools to hand and don’t stand up till I tell you,” he said, and started to load again.

Mr. Murray was right down in the trench with them, his coat off to keep it out of the mud. He cursed the mischance that had caused him to wear his only good coat today. He had expected the visit from Lord Howe. Now he was crouched in a muddy trench on a wet day in his best smallclothes and he was damned if he was getting mud on his only proper coat. He rolled it tight and put it inside a linen forage sack that one of the black men handed him silently. The tall fellow fired the musket again. Murray knew his type-a killer, if ever he’d seen one.

Murray was puzzled that all these men were staying. He’d watched work parties run off at the first sign of enemy activity throughout his career, in Holland and Germany and Spain, and he’d never seen a parcel of native diggers grab their tools as if they meant business. His professional honor and maybe his advancement were at stake. They had nothing to gain or lose.

Another patter of rifle balls against the lip of the upcast earth. The tall black man was lying behind it now, covered in mud that made him even more difficult for the enemy to distinguish. He fired again, and some of the black men raised a small cheer. Murray saw that his assistant, the black man who did his writing, was down. That was a waste. Peters had been as educated a man as Murray had seen in the army.

The black man next to him was pointing down the field.

“They gon’ be some mad now!” said the smallest black, a mere boy. He laughed.

The advance across the low autumn grass was exciting at first. The silent parapet of the distant earthwork seemed like the pretend enemy in one of Captain Lawrence’s exercises. They formed their front rapidly, although slow for the lack of the drum, and then they moved forward. Their line was steady enough, bowing slightly and recovering as the men tried to overcome their nerves and remember the lessons of the drill fields.

The first shot was a shock, as the little earthwork had seemed undefended. A man went down off to Lake’s left. He couldn’t see who it was, but the man screamed and flopped on the ground. George snapped his head back to the front, tearing his attention away from the downed man, but others didn’t, and the line bowed badly.

The second shot missed. It passed close enough to George that he could hear the distinctive sound that the passage of the bullet made. He looked around and met the eyes of his friend Isaac. Isaac had heard the sound too. His eyes had a hurt quality that they hadn’t had before, almost like the shot hadn’t missed. George knew that the bullet had passed between them. His heart beat even faster.

The third shot took Captain Lawrence just in the middle of the chest. It hit both his gorget and his silver belt plate, and the combination saved his life, but he had no way of knowing that at the time. He went down hard, and there was blood and pain. He screamed. Men ran to him, and several competed to lift him up. Bludner shouted at them and finally dismissed two men to carry the captain back.

“He’s one man, ya’ bastards! The niggers won’ fight. Now come on!” Bludner seemed enraged by their hesitation after the captain went down. Lake settled his pack on his shoulders and pushed forward. They weren’t so much a line anymore, even after just a few shots, but most of the men were going forward, a little quicker than the parade ground had taught them. The enemy musket fired again and George tried to imagine what whole volleys of musketry might do to a line like this.

“…niggers won’ fight. Now come on!”

The words sounded distinct over the few yards that now separated them. Virgil and Jim knew the voice instantly. They both started shouting at Caesar. He was loading again, eyeing the range. Murray grabbed the shoulder of the black man crouching next to him.

“Are you lads going to fight?” Murray had to know.

“Oh, yas, suh!” said Tonny. His eyes were almost glazed. He didn’t turn his head. He was looking just over the top of the upcast.

Caesar was listening to Jim, now. He brought the musket up to his shoulder and fired again, but missed. He thought he had time for one more.

“Those men is slave-takers, boys!” he shouted. A low, dangerous noise came from the black men.

“Are ye slaves, now? Or Ethiopians!” Caesar’s voice carried over the field. Even the blacks who were really only day labor lifted their voices and roared.

Murray was too stunned by the events to consider giving orders. This black man, the tall one, was giving the orders. Murray was used to letting the infantry do the killing while he built the forts and the machines, and he let nature take its course. He knew he was seeing something, though. He drew his sword, a short saber of no particular quality.

Caesar slammed the bayonet on to the end of the musket. It was empty, and the enemy was close. He didn’t think it would suit the men with him to wait in the trench, now that their blood was up, and he stood up, tall among the others huddled under the upcast for cover, and bellowed.

“At them, Ethiopians!”

They swarmed up the short pile of earth and right into the enemy line. There was no time for thought, or flinching.

The black faces appeared out of the earth at his feet and Lake swung his musket hard, punching one of them straight off his feet. Next to him, Isaac took another down and then shot him on the ground and George remembered that his own musket was loaded. He saw the flash of red and white among the workers and he aimed at it and fired, hitting the officer. Isaac was clubbed from his feet and another man from the rear rank stepped into his place.

“Stand your ground!” he cried, and he felt men rally to him, press alongside him in the chaos. This was not how he had imagined it, but they were going to hold.

Caesar leapt into the midst of the enemy, his musket and bayonet low in his right hand and a shovel in his left. He blocked a feeble blow with the shovel and pounded the bayonet home in the man’s chest as he had been taught since childhood, ripped it clear and stepped on his victim to close with the next, who was paper white in the sun. Caesar killed him, too. He was bellowing, his heart was charging within him and yet the world came to him with perfect clarity, and he realized that if he broke through the rear of the enemy line the rifles would shoot at him from the wood. He whirled on another man, pushing him off his feet with the shovel and then pinning him to the earth with the bayonet. The man squirmed, and the smell of his guts filled Caesar’s nostrils, but he stepped on the man’s chest and pulled his bayonet clear just as something sliced along his ribs and he stumbled back.

A big man, as big as he, thrust at him again with a bayonet. Caesar swung the shovel up to block and lunged with his own musket and bayonet, but the man rotated on his front foot and brought the butt of his musket up into Caesar’s shoulder and he dropped the shovel as the wave of pain hit. Desperate, he jumped back, his bayonet licking out to cover his retreat and going deep into his adversary’s right arm.

Caesar caught the other man’s eye for a moment as he drew back the musket for another stab, but a body cannoned into him from behind and almost knocked him down. The other man took a pistol from his belt and snapped it at him, but the priming was gone and the frizzen open, and it wouldn’t fire. His adversary threw the pistol at his head and he ducked, and the big man slipped away into the maelstrom behind him. Caesar glanced around, and just avoided being spitted by the man who had struck him in the side. He twisted and parried with his own musket. His new opponent was young, gritted his teeth like a fighter and struck rapid blows in an attempt to overwhelm Caesar’s defense.

George Lake had thrown himself into the big black to buy Bludner a moment to finish him, but Bludner was gone, and even one-handed the man seemed to shrug off his best effort. He parried once, then again, and realized that the tide had shifted and he was now the prey. He backed, stumbled, and went down, tangled with another man. Even as he began to lose his balance, he tried to keep his musket up, but he was too slow, and he watched the man slide the bayonet down his gun barrel and smash his hand. He was suddenly looking into the other man’s eyes, curled on his side and unarmed, and the other man towered over him. Then he seemed to nod; at least, that’s how Lake told the story later. He nodded, smiled a little, and backed away, leaving Lake hurt but alive.

Caesar was content to let the young one live. He had eyes full of courage, even when his last defense was taken from him, and he was injured-he would not fight again today. Caesar backed up three steps, free of the fighting for the first time in what seemed like hours.

There were men coming up from behind them, more men in rebel coats.

“Sergeant McDonald!”

“Sir!”

“Take the two left files off to the flank and try to locate the source of that firing.”

“Sir.”

“If you please, sir, I’d be most happy to go myself.” Jeremy was a little surprised at himself. He usually remained silent during any military activity, as it was not his business and he feared that he would be excluded if he spoke out of turn. But he had a good set of eyes and the fastest horse.

Captain Stewart listened as the sound of another single distant shot echoed back to them. He considered Jeremy, his quality as a rider, the speed and wind of his mount, his steadiness. Stewart rode up close.

“Give me a picture. Who’s shooting, what the target is. Quick as you can, and Godspeed.”

Jeremy gave a sketchy wave with his riding whip, as close to a salute as he dared, and his horse sprang away. Behind him, Stewart turned the head of his company to the left and ordered them to extend into line.

Jeremy cantered easily over the wet leaves under the trees. So far, all America looked like woods and farms, with nothing as extensive as an English market town anywhere, with the possible exception of the town of New York, still just a smudge of wood smoke on the horizon ahead. He came over a little ridge and saw the enemy works on the opposite height, and then the sound of a shot drew his eye closer, to the little redoubt where a single red waistcoat showed in the trench among a small band of black laborers. One of them was lying out over the parapet and firing a musket at a full company of rebel infantry advancing resolutely from the woods at the base of the ridge. He saw it at a glance, even recognized Mr. Murray of the engineers kneeling, coatless, in the trench of the redoubt. He whirled his horse just in time to see a section of rebel infantry break from the taller trees to his back and start toward him.

Jeremy’s horse was already in motion and he smiled, a feral grin of elation and fear together. He fumbled with drawing his smallsword, as the scabbard hung from chains and wasn’t intended for a clean draw on horseback. It took time, and his horse’s hooves took him closer to the rebels with every second. One of them was bringing his musket to his shoulder, but the others were either looking open-mouthed or smiling.

“Get the darkie on the horse,” Weymes called to the lead file. “Get the horse! An’ don’ hurt him none, or I’ll have your hide!”

Gorton had his musket up to fire and he brought it down even as he caught the gleam of a sword being drawn.

“Nigger’s going to ride us down!” he yelled, and leaned forward, musket to his shoulder, and fired.

The shot went somewhere. Jeremy was past caring. He had his sword out, his seat was solid, and he took a pistol from the holster on his saddle, leaned forward as he had been taught since infancy, and shot the first man he passed in the chest. Another man grabbed for his reins and he ran the man through, his sword point catching in bone for a moment and almost pulling out of his hand. He felt the horse gather itself for a jump and he dropped his heels, sat square and gave the animal his weight where she would want it, and they were up and over some obstruction he never glimpsed and in among the trees.

Jeremy cantered under the branches until he saw the welcome line of red moving toward him. He arrived in front of Stewart in a spray of leaves, his sword still clutched in his hand. It was red halfway down its length, with a curious blue-red shimmer that looked like an armorer’s finish. The tip was broken clean off, about two inches up the blade.

“Trouble, Jeremy?”

“Company of infantry going for our post. Mr. Murray in command of a group of laborers. They seem to be resisting. Shots are one of the laborers firing. I ran into a spot of trouble, a section going for the rear of the post.” Jeremy’s words came in bursts, and he was trying to find all the breath he had possessed only a few minutes ago. His chest was tight, his throat nearly closed, and his voice was coming out in short, high pulses.

“How far, then?”

“A quarter mile. Less. Two minutes at a canter.”

“Right, then. McDonald! Forward. Have the men trail their firelocks and move at the double. Enemy will be front, in…in what, Jeremy?”

“Blue coats, Sergeant.”

“Blue coats and at the double it is, sir.” McDonald began to bellow orders.

Caesar saw the bluecoats coming from behind them with something akin to rage, because he thought they might have driven the first party off but sensed that the addition of this further handful from behind would finish them. He wiped his head with his arm and his shirt came away covered in blood, and everywhere he looked there were men down, men he knew. He flung himself at a man fighting Mr. Murray, determined to die well. He might have been encouraged by the sound of the bugle to his right, but he didn’t know that only the British light infantry used the instrument. If he thought about the sound at all, he thought it was more rebels.

Jim was down right at his feet, his head and shoulder all blood from a musket butt. Virgil and Tonny were back to back with shovels, and the results of their determination were laid about them. Some of the laborers had already run, and several had been taken. Mr. Murray fought on, his cheap saber well handled. The rebels seemed to have lost the stomach for the fight and had mostly drawn off a few yards, or run up to the top of the new earth wall. Caesar ran Murray’s opponent through, and the man groaned and fell like a puppet with its strings cut.

The big rebel who had wounded Caesar raised a pistol and shot one of the laborers.

“Down yer weapons, you Nigras, or by God we’ll shoot you like dogs.” He seemed to see Virgil for the first time and he raised his empty pistol.

Virgil was clearly hurt, but he began to hobble toward the big man. Caesar knew they had to charge the rebels now, before they were shot down, helpless to resist. He never thought of dropping his weapon, but others did, more than a few.

The new group he had seen coming were yelling from fifty yards away, but Caesar was beyond caring. He gripped his musket close in his right hand and flung himself at the big man.

The big man saw him and took a musket from one of his men, who was standing open-mouthed as the two black men staggered toward them.

The red skirmish line moved through the woods swiftly, like a disciplined herd of deer. Jeremy could hear the Scots and English voices calling to each other to Keep up, Jock, or Get that line straight. Discipline was different when battle was imminent.

He was alive, and had fought, and now he was going to do it again.

“There’s the open ground,” he said to Captain Stewart at his elbow.

“And there are the rebels. Sound skirmish!” the last to his bugler, running at his heels like a good dog. As the notes sounded, the whole line stopped and muskets came down to aim, the file leader in every file pair picking a target and firing in their own time. The range was long, there was brush, and only two of the bluecoats fell, but it was enough to disperse the party that had tried to take Jeremy.

“At them!” cried Stewart, the first order he had given directly, and he was off through the trees. Jeremy crouched down, clutched his broken sword and followed him, spurring his horse to catch up.

Weymes didn’t see the redcoats until two of his men fell. Their red coats were the same color as the autumn leaves, and his whole focus had been on the resistance of the blacks. Before he could say a word, the rest of his party took to their heels, running back to the cover of the woods nearly a quarter of a mile away. He paused a moment and fired his musket at a horseman, but he was alone, and he ran.

Bludner heard the shooting and instantly guessed the cause. It had all gone on too long and the redcoats were on them. He pointed the musket at the man who had shot Weymes back in Virginny and pulled the trigger, but the pan was full of water and there wasn’t even a spark. He threw it at the black man shuffling toward him.

“Form your front! Fall in and rally,” he yelled. He wished he had a drummer. One boy was down, probably dead, and the other was too scared to beat, his sticks clenched uselessly in his fists, his eyes glazed.

Rebels ran right past them to get back to the safety of their own ranks, and most just kept going. Caesar and Virgil were so spent that they weren’t able to pursue, although there was one more sharp fight as a small band of rebels tried to take them. Caesar felt a jolt as someone bumped him from behind and he saw a patch of muddy scarlet in his peripheral vision. Murray was behind him.

Jeremy saw the group of rebels run for the woods off in the valley and determined that he would cut them off. He rode the last one down and saw it was the little man who had shouted orders. The man turned, but too late, and Jeremy hammered the broken tip of his sword into the man’s back and through the lung, and he fell, his weight dragging straight off the point. Little puffs of smoke came from the distant woods and something hit his horse a hammer blow, and she stumbled and reared. A bubbling red spot had appeared on her withers. She was difficult to control for a moment and then she settled, and he pulled her around and spurred her back up the hill.

At the base of the half-constructed redoubt, he saw a big black man fighting. He was head and shoulders taller than his adversaries and the other two men fighting beside him, and every blow seemed to fell an enemy, and it struck Jeremy that he was watching something from the Iliad. Even as he watched, the man felled his last opponent with a vicious upthrust of a bayoneted musket held short, like a spear, and he turned his head, catching Jeremy’s eyes across the field.

The rebel line was only half formed. Some had fled directly, running past their comrades to the apparent safety of the woods, while others either stood dumbly or fumbled to reload their muskets. Stewart’s company ghosted up to the edge of the redoubt even as Jeremy cantered in behind them.

“Rifles in the wood,” he called to his master.

Stewart looked at him and smiled a welcoming, friendly smile that Jeremy treasured.

“Best keep your head down, then,” Stewart said with a smile. He was always good-humored in moments of danger. The rebels were melting away at the sight of his whole company moving up on their front. The knot of resistance by the black laborers almost at his feet blocked the fire of his left platoon. Several rebels fired and one of his men fell.

“Right platoon! Make ready! Present! Fire!”

The volley sounded like a single shot. There was smoke on the breeze for a moment, a deep smell of sulfur, and then screams from freshly wounded men, and the enemy were gone.

“At them, Lights! At them. Sergeant McDonald, don’t let them rally! Stay on them into the woods. I want those woods cleared!”

“Sir!” McDonald sprang off after his men, who were already pouring down the hill. Stewart waited a moment, looking to the left and right, checking his flanks. His glance passed over the blacks, many of whom were busy taking up muskets dropped by the rebels. He walked his horse over to Murray, the engineer officer. Murray looked stunned.

“Thought I might have lost you there, Lieutenant Murray.”

“Aye. Thought the same myself.”

Stewart waved his riding whip at Murray and started down the hill. He saw one of his men spin and fall, hit by rifle fire from the deadly wood, and he leaned low over the neck of his horse, spurring it on down the hill. He quickly overtook the line of his men and plunged in among the fleeing rebels. Suddenly the air was full of the buzz of bullets, and he was hit, but he carried on. His men followed him, and now they were over the open ground and pressing into the brushy edge of the wood, screaming and shouting as they came. Most huzza’d; a few yelled older, darker things from the Borders or the clans of the north, and his junior lieutenant, Crawford, kept baying “George and England” over and over.

“This way, sir!” Jeremy had stayed close by Stewart’s side down the hill, his horse still bleeding and moving erratically. He thought she was hit again. As they reached the base of the hill he had seen a small trail leading into the wood, a path well worn by generations of woodcutters.

Stewart was on the trail in a breath. His sword flashed once as he found a target in the woods, and then Jeremy and his own men were all about him, and the woods were theirs. The rebel rifles could be seen in the distance, flying over the ridge, the last of them vanishing just as Jeremy jumped the last stumps into the open ground. They were too canny to be caught in the woods where the bayonets of the regulars were more dangerous to them than their rifles were to the enemy. The rebel infantry company was rallying on the Brooklyn Heights, their numbers sadly depleted, and many of the men had thrown away their muskets.

Crawford came up with McDonald, flushed with triumph. McDonald was all business. A little spat like this was nothing to Sergeant McDonald.

“The price, McDonald?”

“Nixon lost the number of his mess on the hill, sir. Lyle and Somers wounded. I wouldn’t give much for Somers’s chances. Lyle looks all right. And Guibert burst his musket, the useless gowk. He overcharged it.”

“We’ll hold this wood until I can get us some relief.”

“Aye, sir. Ye should see to yoursel’ sir. You’re hit.”

“Crawford, see to it that Sergeant McDonald instructs you on how to post men in a wood. You are in command. Don’t interfere with McDonald.”

Crawford looked up at him with something bordering on adoration.

Stewart picked his way out of the wood and cantered up the hill, a little light-headed. To every section of his own men that he passed he called out some praise, or a joke. Keeping his seat seemed to be harder, and he wondered absently where Jeremy had got to. He looked down and saw blood flowing easily over his right boot, and as his eyes traveled up his body he saw that the river of blood went down his thigh and over his knee. His white breeches were redder than his scarlet coat. He swayed a little.

The blacks had formed into a very passable line at the top of the hill in front of the redoubt. Most of them had muskets. As he rode up, the tall one ordered them to present arms, a surprising compliment given the situation, and he took off his cap.

“Well fought, lads. Well fought.” His voice was weak. He shook his head to clear it and wondered where Murray was.

“Who’s in charge here?” he asked, his voice barely a whisper, and started to slump from his saddle. Suddenly there were strong hands on him, and Jeremy’s voice in his ear. He was down in the mud, lying on his back, and someone was pulling a bandage tight on his thigh. He hadn’t lost consciousness. The big black man was leaning over him.

“You’ll be fine, sir. Ball passed right through and into your saddle.”

“And you are?”

“Julius Caesar, sir.”

Stewart leaned back in Jeremy’s arms, and smiled up at the familiar face as if at a joke.

“Of course you are,” he said, and went away for a while.

Caesar watched the black man on the horse with undisguised admiration as he rode off, following the handcart pulled by four of Caesar’s laborers. Impossible as it seemed, his first thought had been that the mounted black man was an officer, although his dark blue coat and feathered turban looked different from every other uniform he had seen.

His muscles seemed to have seized up, as if he had worked too hard all day without rest. The fight had been short, but he had spent energy recklessly. Virgil looked old, his face pinched, and his shoulders stooped. Caesar hadn’t seen him so done in since the swamp. Jim looked as bad, although Tonny, who had fought like a tiger from the start, looked fresh as a new calf. Their men were spread out over the hillside, looking for any wounded and plundering the dead without a shadow of remorse.

“Sergeant Peters be dead,” Virgil said, thrusting his chin toward the little redoubt they had all fought to save.

“I’ll jus’ see to him, then. Go get us some good equipment.”

Virgil nodded and moved away slowly, like an old man.

Jim followed Caesar, with a mattock and a shovel. They didn’t say much for a while. Caesar picked the older man’s corpse up easily and carried him back to the edge of the broken ground, far from the redoubt and the little patch of woods where the rebels had hidden themselves. He thought that maybe the war would linger here, as it had at Great Bridge, and he didn’t want Peters to be dug up when some other unit put in trenches. Once he had a spot, he looked over his shoulder at the view, and it was a good one, right over the little redoubt and then over the valley to Brooklyn Heights. He broke the ground, his muscles protesting every stroke. He let the pick do most of the work. Then Jim stepped in with a shovel and started to dig. It was the shovel that Caesar had used in the fighting, but the blood on the blade was quickly scoured away by the damp earth. His wound hurt him. He wanted to smoke.

One by one, other men came and dug, or used the pick. It reminded him of Tom’s grave in Virginia, and his eyes filled with tears unexpectedly. He walked a little apart so that the men wouldn’t see him, and almost ran over Tonny.

“Virgil says you have to see this an’ come quick!” said Tonny. Caesar followed him down the hill, toward the wood where the regulars were. They were smoking. He could smell the smoke. Virgil was well down, on a little flat.

“’Memba’ this man?” Virgil asked. A small white man, his face a mask of old scars, lay broken like an abandoned doll on a trash heap. Caesar shook his head.

“One of they slave-takuhs came fo’ us when you was sick. I shot him back in the swamp, an’ now he daid.” Virgil laughed aloud. “He came all this way and he daid!”

Caesar looked at the little knot of wool on the man’s shoulder marking him as a corporal. He knelt and cut it free with his clasp knife.

“Now you’re the corporal, Virgil.”

He looked down on the body and spat. So did Virgil, and then Tonny.

“Reckon they was chasin’ us?” asked Virgil. “The other one was there. The big one. I saw him.”

Caesar nodded. “They was after us fo’ slaves, Virgil. Nothin’ mo’. Nothing more.”

Virgil frowned, and he and Tonny had a brief struggle to get the knot of white wool on to Virgil’s jacket.

“Any orders?”

“When the hole is dug, we form them up and fire the volleys, just like we used to.” Caesar was eyeing the bodies around them for equipment.

“Reckon we can keep our arms?”

Caesar knelt by a young man whose life was gurgling out of a hole in his chest the size of a dollar. He was squirming in pain, moaning, his eyes rolled back in his head. Caesar watched the boy writhe for a moment and then knelt, drew his clasp knife and used it under the boy’s ribs and the boy died, quietly, without even a kick. Then he took the boy’s accoutrements, including a nice bayonet and a leather hunting pouch with a priming horn. The priming horn was engraved with Isaac Stark, his horn. His musket was a fine one, too, and the pouch had a pipe and tobacco.

Caesar nodded at the body, a little queasy from the killing. The boy had been in pain, gut shot. He hoped he’d done right. “Bury him, too,” he said, and Virgil agreed.

Mr. Murray hobbled up to the ring of blacks, where they were watching the last scoops of earth removed from the graves. He watched as Virgil formed them into a line at the graveside. The old Ethiopians formed easily, almost like regulars. Other men had never held a musket before, and Virgil put them in the back rank.

Caesar was smoking, his pipe upside down in the rain. Isaac Stark had made good char and kept his tinder dry, and Caesar thought he must have been a good soldier for all his youth. He was conscious that Virgil had the men in hand. He knocked his pipe out on the sole of his boot, careful not to snap the stem, and then walked to the front of the company. Murray stood off to the side with his sword drawn.

“I take it you’re the sergeant, now,” Murray said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Then get on with it, Sergeant.”

One by one, the shots for the dead rang out over the hillside, and the smoke of their volleys hung in the damp air for a moment, covering the little mounds of wet earth until the wind came and blew the smoke away.