Washington and Caesar

4

New Jersey and New York, July 4, 1778

Jeremy was dead.

It hit Stewart at different times, because Jeremy had been there so often and because he was weak and needed the man. Both men, Jeremy the servant and the other Jeremy, who could make a joke about Miss McLean and a suggestion about Sally. Sometimes in one breath.

He would have to do something about Sally. Even in a fever, he could see that.

He lay in a little house somewhere in the Jerseys and watched the sun creep across his white, white quilt. He thought about Jeremy, and Sally, and once he found himself having a conversation with Jeremy who was not, of course, there. He worried for a little that he was losing his mind, but later he realized that he had a fever.

Men came to see him from time to time, and a girl fed him soup. He didn’t really know the men, but he had enough spirit to see that they were Continental officers and that they were kind. He had visited their wounded often enough. It was that sort of war, sometimes.

Then he woke in the night and was well. Weaker, somehow, than when he dreamed and spoke with Jeremy, but better, too. He’d had fevers before, and he knew this one had just broken. He lay awake, thinking about Jeremy in a different way. He smiled a little, and slept.

When he next awoke, one of the men was by his side with a watch, looking at his pulse and counting, while another was standing behind him.

“Quite a credit to the trade, this fellow. Healthy as a horse in no time,” the nearer man said, putting his hand down on the coverlet. “You awake, sir?”

“I am.”

“It always pleases a doctor when one of his patients does him the courtesy of surviving a treatment.”

“Give my man the bill.” That little pain. He had no man. “Perhaps not. Give it to me, I suppose.”

“I think the Continental Army is footing the bill, sir. But I need to tell you that your leg, while healing, has been shockingly set about, and that I took a pistol ball out of your shoulder, and another out of an older wound low on your back. It was there, and I thought I might as well cut.”

Stewart nodded, a little troubled by the number of wounds, and puzzled, as he couldn’t remember getting any of them.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“Not I, sir. Perhaps Captain Lake, here. But you are on the mend. I’ll look in again later-always a pleasure to see one that heals, eh?”

The doctor indicated some medicines to the lady of the house and bowed his way out. The officer remained, watching him in silence, as the lady moved about the little room, tossing the pillow and sitting him up. His arm was in a very tight bandage that went across his chest, and his leg was in another. He was afraid to look at the base of the bed, so sure was he that one of his legs was gone, but she moved the blankets to air them and roll him over to strip the sheets, and he saw it. It wasn’t exactly handsome, and there was some blood and some yellow fluid on the bandage, but the whole leg was there.

The woman prattled as she moved about the room.

“I hope the captain doesn’t think we sympathize with the king just because they gave us a king’s officer to heal up,” she said, smiling at the other man. “But we are all God’s creatures, aren’t we, sir?”

The Continental officer smiled and bowed his head.

She turned on Captain Stewart. “And you’re awake, so we ought to come to be friends, don’t you think?”

He wanted to retreat from all that energy.

“Your servant, ma’am.”

She curtsied. “And yours, sir. I’m Betsy Holding. And you?”

“Captain John Julius Stewart, ma’am.” He looked at the other officer. “If you are my guard, sir, I think I can guarantee that I will make no attempt to escape today.”

The other man smiled a little nervously and tossed his hat in his hands. He made a sketchy little bow and Stewart thought that he was probably not very well bred, but then wondered what his own bow had looked like before Jeremy got hold of it. Always Jeremy.

“Captain George Lake, sir. I…” Captain Lake clearly had something very difficult to say. He looked out the window, and Betsy, a woman who had several grown children and was widely known for her sense, bustled around the room one more time and withdrew.

“I can see the gentlemen need to talk,” she said.

Lake pulled up a chair and sat on it, backwards, his chin on the top rung of the ladderback. Stewart noted that he was wearing a very fine hunting sword. French, he thought.

“Can you tell me how I came to be captured?” he asked.

Lake looked at him and there was some sort of hurt in his eyes. Stewart wondered if he had done the man an injury, but it wasn’t that sort of hurt.

“Your horse was hit by a ball. I think it was a roundshot from one of our guns, or perhaps a piece of grape. I saw you go down myself, all in a tumble. Nasty fall.”

Stewart nodded. “I think I can agree to that.”

“I marched right by you. Your men were trying to flank us and the grenadiers were rallying. I didn’t think you looked like much of a threat.”

Stewart nodded, and Lake looked away.

“Your…your man came and stood over you.” Lake leaned forward. His eyes were intense.

Stewart tried to raise a hand.

“I know. He was hit. Somehow, I remember that part. I felt him fall across me.”

“He was shot while he was trying to surrender, sir. I watched it, and I have waited for you to wake up because I wanted to apologize. I can’t think why your man was shot. It turned my stomach. And I know the man who did it-Bludner, who was my own sergeant once.”

Stewart looked at the other man, who seemed very moved. He was young and gawky, with a colonial drawl, and his uniform was not quite the thing, but he had that air of confidence that Stewart always associated with the better type of officers. Stewart noticed these things because he was quite consciously walling himself off from the knowledge that his Jeremy had been shot down in cold blood. He admitted to himself that he had been conscious, had suspected this to be true and simply ignored it. He found himself looking into George Lake’s clear green eyes. They were wide and deep and didn’t seem to hide any secrets at all. He was very young, and for a moment, Stewart felt as old as the hills. Bludner, now that struck a chord. It was a name Sally said both awake and asleep. Stewart tried to overcome his fatigue.

“Bludner? A slave-taker?”

“I think he did some such, yes. I thought to report him to the army.”

Stewart sat back, tired and old.

“Come back another day, sir.” He put his head back on the pillow, and went instantly to sleep.

They moved back into the barracks easily, as if they had never been away, and all the women came out to greet them. Many of the Guides’ women had never gone to Philadelphia because they’d found work in New York or just didn’t want to follow the army, and Caesar thought that perhaps none of them had expected them to be in Philadelphia very long.

Black Lese was there, and Mrs. Peters, coughing and weeping a little and happy to see them back. And there was little Nelly Van Sluyt, who looked half her man’s size, and others-women and children who seemed to outnumber the soldiers five to one or more. Caesar had seen that the men were paid before they marched to the barracks, and now he watched attentively as money was handed over to wives who hadn’t seen much but rations for nearly a year.

He saw Polly standing with Big Lese and talking to her, bobbing her head as she did when addressing someone her elder, the very soul of courtesy. She looked up at him and smiled, a tiny secret smile with a long message attached, and he responded with a great grin that cracked his whole face in two. And then he went back to work, finding barracks space for the new recruits he’d acquired since they marched for the transports a year before and occasionally facing the hard job of throwing an interloper out of a bunk he or she didn’t have a right to. Many black refugees came to the barracks first, or last. And there were holes in the ranks, and losses, and women who knew from letters that their man was dead but had come for the parade in hopes there had been a mistake, and other, harder women who came to get their man’s last pay, or perhaps a replacement man. It was the same at every barracks in New York, and the men had joked about it the night before. Now it didn’t seem so funny, with women and children being turned out because they were no longer attached to the army, and others coming in. They had to find space for new men they had picked up, or move men. Sam the bugler was no longer a child, and needed a bed. Tonny had fallen and a new corporal got his space. On and on. Through it all, Caesar and Fowver worked, each wanting to be elsewhere or to enjoy some of the happier portions, but they had no time and theirs was the only authority high enough to settle the resentments.

When Lieutenant Martin arrived, Caesar left him with two of the stickiest domestic situations and plunged into the kitchen, where Mrs. Peters and Black Lese were measuring out the allowance of pork. It was a pork day, and there would be some pudding-plum duff, by the smell.

“Where’s Polly?” he asked and they both gave him the knowing look that matrons reserve for the young and besotted.

“She waited,” said Lese in her West Indian sing-song.

“But she said that as you were so important,” said Mrs. Peters, “she’d just go about her business.”

They laughed at him when his face fell. “I do like to see you look like a normal young man, an’ not just Mars, the God of War,” said Mrs. Peters. She had a special privilege: although her husband was dead and had never technically been a member of the Black Guides, or even the Provincial Corps of the British Army, she was mysteriously listed on their rolls and continued there. She and Lese laughed at his confusion and weighed another piece of pork.

“Of course,” Mrs. Peters continued, “she did say that if you were decently repentant, she and her father might consider having you to dinner.”

“It’s not my fault!” he said, looking at the two of them. They, if anyone, should understand. Lese Fowver knew every detail of every scrap of a quarrel in the company, and Mrs. Peters had been dealing with barracks issues for four years, and a house full of slaves for most of her life. They both just smiled again.

“She’s in that little church on Queen Street, sewing,” Lese said. “Maybe you should find her.”

Mrs. Peters stopped him. “Did you leave that nice Mr. Martin to deal with the likes of Hester Black?” Hester was the most married, and most voluble, woman in the company. She rarely lacked an issue for her feeling of grievance.

“I did.”

“Shame on you, Julius Caesar. And he wanting to get away and find his Miss Hammond.” But Caesar was gone.

The next day Stewart was able to sit up and eat unaided, and read the Bible, which seemed to be the house’s only book. He thumbed through it idly, looking at stories, and thinking about slavery. He could almost feel his bones knitting.

Mrs. Holding sat with him, now that he made decent company. She seemed surprised to find that he didn’t have a tail, and that the Bible didn’t burn his hands. She and her husband were dyed-in-the-wool Whigs, “patriots” as they called themselves. He tried not to use the word “rebel” in her house. She had two sons, both in the militia, and two daughters, both married to men of property. She reminded him of every good wife in Edinburgh, and yet she was thoroughly American in the same way that the Miss Hammonds were.

“Do you have a slave, ma’am?” he asked suddenly. Her mouth became firm.

“I don’t hold with it,” she said crossly. “It ain’t right for Christian folk.” He wondered if she had ever allowed her husband an opinion. He liked her.

“Just so,” he said, putting his head back on the pillow.

Polly kissed him and held him close, but before they had time to babble ten words, she stopped him and pushed him away. He thought it was because they were in a church.

“Sally’s in a state,” she said.

He wanted to stay with Polly and she wanted him to stay, but Sally was there between them and he knew he owed it to the woman to find her and talk. He could imagine that Sally was in a state, and he thought he knew why.

He went to find Sally. She wasn’t at Mother Abbott’s anymore-Captain Stewart had seen to that. She had a set of rooms up two flights of stairs over a hat maker’s on Broadway. It was an expensive set of rooms. He was careful going there. Although it was only a few steps up the street from the Moor’s Head, people in New York were touchy about color. He thought of Jeremy, who seemed above such notions and yet completely conversant with them, and he thought of fencing with Jeremy just a few doors along. His eyes filled for a moment and he had to stop. When he was himself again, he went to the narrow door for the upstairs rooms and opened it. A woman in a neat bonnet poked her head out of the door to the shop.

“Are you a friend of our lodger, young man?” she asked.

“I am, ma’am,” he said, making a leg as Jeremy had taught him. She nodded as if it were her due.

“Do your friend a service then, young man. Tell her that I will not have a lodger who makes a nuisance! And that goes doubly for a black one. I don’t care how solid her money is.”

Caesar bowed. He had learned from Jeremy how useful these courtesies were for hiding one’s thoughts.

“And no male visitors in the evening, or she is out. I told my husband that it was a mistake to take your kind in here.”

He bowed again. He felt Jeremy’s voice in his head, and he smiled.

“What kind is that, ma’am?”

She looked at him and shook her head as if it was a matter of little importance.

“What visitor did she have?”

“Now that’s a proper question for a brother to ask of his sister, I’m thinking.” Caesar wasn’t sure what he thought of being Sally’s brother, but he let it pass. “A little white man. I didn’t like his looks, and I’m certain he hit her. What do you think of that, young man?”

He shook his head.

“Hmmf. As I thought. None of us is any better than God made us, I expect. But I want her quiet or gone, do you hear?” She nodded vigorously and shut the door.

Caesar shook his head at his own thoughts as he went up the stairs and knocked.

Sally answered. She was in a shift, and drunk.

“I heard Jeremy’s dead,” she said. He smelt the rum on her. She was naked under the shift, and yet he was quite unmoved by it, because she was so clearly distraught.

“He is,” Caesar said, coming into her room.

“I loved him.” She sat on her bed, a fancy canopy bed from a shop. Her trunks were mostly unpacked on the floor. Her lip was split and she had a bruise on her face and another on her naked shoulder. Caesar nodded easily. He had suspected that Sally was sharing the master and the man, but it hadn’t been his place to say, and Jeremy had never even hinted. Jeremy could be very closed about things.

And Caesar wasn’t too sure he believed Sally, either. She might just love him now for the drama. She was not a simple woman.

“And Captain Stewart?” Caesar asked. He was surprised at himself, because he didn’t care. He didn’t want to know.

“I think I love him a little,” said Sally. “Don’ tell me he’s dead too.”

“No. He’s a prisoner, but Mr. Martin says he’s already on the list to be exchanged. Polly said that he needs shirts and the like, and thought you’d help make him up a package to send through the lines. There’s a cartel going tonight.”

She started at the words through the lines.

“What’s a car-tel?” she asked, a little listlessly.

“A flag of truce,” he said. He was suddenly suspicious of her, as he had been of Lark in the swamp and of Marcus White. “Who hit you, Sally?”

She just shook her head. “A man,” she answered, as if that was all the answer that was needed.

Caesar shook his head in weary disgust. “You loved them, but you went and found a man? And he hit you? What does Polly see in you, or Reverend White?”

She was crying again, drunken tears that could have been real or fake.

“I don’ know, Julius Caesar.”

He looked around the room, at the wreck of her trunks, and smelled the reek of the rum.

“We’re going to clean this room. And you. And we’re going to find the captain some shirts and suchlike, so that he thinks his mistress likes him enough to bother.”

Sally just sat on the bed, shaking with sobs. She was hiding her eyes, and it almost seemed that she was laughing. He shook his head.

“Your landlady wants you gone. How are you going to explain that to him? You want to go back to Mother Abbott’s? Or just lean your back against a building an’ get it done with any sailor trying to make his tide?” He was harsh, and she just sat, her head down, until he finished. Then he went to get Polly. He wanted to slam the door, because it would have made him feel better, but he was afraid the noise would be the last straw for the old woman downstairs.

Stewart got himself up and put on a lovely clean shirt with the embarrassed help of Mrs. Holding. It was one of his own, but someone had rinsed it in lavender and pricked his initials into it since he had sent it north with the shipboard baggage, and he smelled it carefully. It had to be Polly. She could sew, and she took care in matters like this. Sally might dance and talk and drink, but her sewing didn’t run to these fine stitches. He smiled, though, because the perfume on the note had been Sally’s, although the note was in Caesar’s square military hand with another from Simcoe and yet a third from Crawford, all enough to make him dab at his eyes.

And there was a note from Miss McLean. It was a cheerful missive about the turning of summer in the Highlands, the sounds birds made, and her eagerness to be with him. It, too, had a little scent attached. From his bedside, he could read her note and smell her scent, and smell Sally’s, and feel little guilt. Just sorrow, really. He had taken a black mistress because it had seemed less a betrayal than taking a white one. But now, at a distance, he found that he liked Sally fine, and that Jeremy’s death freed him from the guilt of it. It made no sense, but it was fact.

“Your friends, sir?” asked Mrs. Holding. She wanted to get him dressed so that she didn’t have to dally with a man in just breeches and a shirt.

“Just so, ma’am. If you could maneuver that waistcoat round my bandage? Well done. And a stock? Yes, I think they included a buckle.”

She held up his best paste buckle, a magnificent square of dazzling jewels set in silver. He had bought it behind Jeremy’s back. Jeremy thought it vulgar.

“Goodness me, sir. I’ve never seen such a thing. And this is for a man?” She looked at it with something between admiration and horror. “You’ll not see its like in Bergen County!”

“I didn’t think I would,” he said pleasantly. She got the stock buckled.

“And to think you are going to dine with General Washington,” she said, reverentially.

“Yes,” said Stewart, as she tried to fuss with his hair. “Yes, it’s quite an honor for him.”

She struck him gently on the shoulder. “You are quite a card, I find. Quite the young spark.”

He tried not to wince as she tugged at his hair. It made him think of Jeremy, of course, and yet he smiled. Sometimes, thinking of Jeremy made him smile. He opened the letter from Simcoe, and a page from Rivington’s Gazette fell out. He shook it open one-handed and read through the items until he saw the notice that he had been wounded and captured, with a little star beside it, and then it struck him that he had been mentioned in dispatches. He smiled. He flipped it over and saw the quote of the dispatch, a very pretty piece of nonsense that mentioned him in a most heroic light.

Poor Jeremy would have loved this moment, he thought. He put it with Simcoe’s unread letter as he heard Captain Lake ascending the stairs.

Lake put his head round the door and smiled.

“So you are well enough to come?” He seemed very nervous.

Stewart laughed. “A little banged about, but nothing that should worry Mr. Washington.”

“You mustn’t call him that, John.” Lake shook his head. “It makes him that angry.”

Stewart bowed to hide his smile.

“Perhaps you can relieve Mrs. Holding of the odious duties of helping a man to dress by holding that coat, George,” he said easily, and Mrs. Holding chuckled at him.

“He’s been difficult all afternoon, sir,” she said. “I think it the great pity of the world that you have to go and exchange him so that he’ll go back to shooting at you directly.”

Stewart winced as his hand was thrust into the coat and the abused shoulder took the strain.

“I think it will be some time before I’m shooting at Captain Lake.” He smiled at a sudden thought. “Indeed, I wonder if I won’t go home to recover.” Home to Edinburgh, covered in glory. Yes. And then no. He thought of Jeremy, whom he had counted on for humor and for advice in dealing with Miss McLean’s father. But life was going to go on. And he would see Jeremy revenged.

George Lake’s hands were cold with nerves.

“That’s good,” he said. He sounded strained. Stewart frowned at him from inches away and Lake closed his coat.

“Are you worrying about a dinner with General Washington and his staff?”

“I don’t know how to act like them,” he said.

“Fie on you,” said Mrs. Holding. “Don’t be an ungrateful body, Captain Lake. And poor Captain Stewart, putting himself out all morning to show you how to eat like a gentleman.”

Lake hung his head, and Stewart hobbled across the room.

“George Lake, you have, by all accounts, won several actions all by yourself. And now a dinner undoes you, and that with your own general? Look at me, sir. A poor wounded officer surrounded by his enemies, going to eat with the very ogre who looks to overturn the rightful government of this country.”

“You put me in mind of Mr. Lovell, John. He says such things. But Washington is no ogre.”

“That’s your sweetheart’s da’, then?”

George blushed. He had been easy with his confidences, so quickly had he taken a liking to Stewart. And now Stewart was using them to abuse him.

“Oh, fie on it, Captain. She is your sweetheart, will ye, nil ye.”

“Oh, shame on you, Captain Stewart,” cried Mrs. Holding, laughing despite herself.

George Lake simply shook his head at the two of them. “All very well for you to laugh,” he said. “I fairly dread this dinner. And the marquis will be there, too, I have no doubt.”

A week on, and Caesar was finally getting to have his dinner with Polly, although it had widened into a dinner with Polly and her father…and Sally. Caesar hadn’t known what to make of Sally since that afternoon. She hadn’t been drunk again, and had comported herself soberly, and even sat patiently with Polly learning to put an initial on Captain Stewart’s shirt. Sally did one in the time it took Polly to pick out the letters in five others, but that didn’t lessen the accomplishment.

They were to dine at the Moor’s Head, and Caesar arranged it, securing a table and ordering the food. The black patrons seldom ran to such an occasion, but it was not so rare for Reverend White, as he had prosperous friends. And the Black Guides had something of the run of the place. It promised to be a very good dinner, private in the little room off the hall to the kitchen.

Caesar came in his best scarlet coat, wearing a watch he had kept from the days in the swamp and that Jeremy had arranged to repair last year. He had good new boots and fine smallclothes, all of which had been in Jeremy’s traveling trunk. It made him feel odd to wear them. Polly had taken them apart and altered them to fit. He was dressed to ask for Polly’s hand.

“You look very fine,” she said.

She was dressed in a sack-back gown of printed linen that made her look as slim as a young tree, and had a little cap on her head that made her face as beautiful as he had ever seen it.

“You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he said with a bow.

She looked over her shoulder as if looking for someone else in the room, and then smacked him on the arm.

Marcus White was dressed in severe but fashionable black, with a new coat and new smallclothes and a white collar that seemed to shine like righteousness. He was leading Sally by the hand, and she was dressed as modestly as she ever had been in Philadelphia. Caesar, who had to judge men every day, knew in his bones that she had dressed to let Polly be the center of attention, and he liked her for it. As they walked through the common room, every eye there was on them. More than one voice suggested that some of the blacks were getting above themselves, but never loudly, and Major Simcoe rose and kissed Polly’s hand. He didn’t directly address Sally, a complicated piece of social tactics that avoided both offense and impertinence.

“Your servant, miss,” he said formally, and Polly showed him just the least flash of her eyes as she curtsied in return, a flash that made him smile unexpectedly.

Then they crossed the rest of the room and left it for their private dinner.

Stewart was seated near the middle of the table, with Captain Lake across from him and Alexander Hamilton on his right. Lafayette was close, above Hamilton. Opposite Lafayette sat Colonel Henry Lee, now a famous cavalryman. General Washington filled the end of the table with both size and spirit.

They were all men of culture and civility-except perhaps Lake, and he was learning. They did not discuss any matter which might give pain to a guest who was an enemy, but instead chatted amiably about letters and sport. Hamilton was delighted to find that Stewart was a fellow fisherman, and they discoursed on horsehair lines and the latest fashion in hooks and snells for several moments until they realized that they had spread a sort of wondering silence all down the table.

“A glass of wine with you, Captain?” said Lafayette, leaning forward.

“Your servant, Marquis.”

“And perhaps you will then enlighten us all about this multiplying reel?”

Stewart winced in embarrassment.

“I am sorry to be a boor,” he said.

“Nothing of the kind, sir, I assure you, and I can guarantee that my friend Hamilton will insist.”

“Well, then,” said Stewart. “It is a brass winch, for holding line, you see? Except that it has a gear on the shaft so that the user has some mechanical advantage as he winds. Am I plain? So that, instead of just storing your line on a winch, now you could actually use it to land a fish.”

“Gimcrack notion,” said Fitzgerald. “What if the thing slips and you lose your fish?”

“Does the sear slip on a well-made flintlock?”

“I take your point, sir.” Fitzgerald raised his glass, acknowledging it. “But do you really need such an advantage?”

“Oh, as to that…” Stewart shrugged. “I don’t use one meself, mind. I was just explaining to Colonel Hamilton here why they are coming into fashion. Friends of mine had them made in Philadelphia.”

“Oh they did?” Hamilton smiled. “Perhaps I can do the same, now that…Oh, I’m sorry.”

Stewart smiled at them all. “I’m not so sensitive as that.”

Washington, as the senior, could not be asked a direct question; it was not done. But he could listen, and by his listening betray an interest. Stewart realized that Washington was listening attentively, and turned to him, inviting a question.

“These are trout you are speaking of?”

“Oh, pah, trout,” said Hamilton and Stewart together, which gave rise to a general laugh.

“No, sir,” said Stewart. “Although I do enjoy fishing for the trout from time to time, it is the salmon, that prince of fishes, that is the true heart of the sport.”

“So I have gathered from Mr. Bowlker and Mr. Fairfax.” Washington dropped these names so that they would know that he was not behindhand in matters of sport, although the books were far away with his old life at Mount Vernon.

“Oh, sir, indeed?” Stewart had sat through a great many regimental dinners, and he knew that a great deal of complaisance on these matters was expected of him as a guest. A decent show of interest. Greatly daring, Stewart asked him a direct question.

“Do you fish yourself, in Virginia?”

“All too seldom, Captain. We don’t have salmon, and the only trouts I have seen are in the mountains. Have you seen our mountains, Captain?”

“Only from a distance, sir. You always seem to be keeping me from them.”

This last prompted a burst of nervous laughter. Stewart could tell he was sailing close to the wind, but Washington did not seem an utterly formal man, and was obviously used to men of good breeding and good conversation. Judging by Hamilton and Fitzgerald, better breeding than his own. He smiled for the absent Jeremy, who had trained him so well. He looked at George Lake, who was chewing carefully and trying not to be seen.

“Are you a farmer at home, Captain?” Washington clearly wanted him to say yes, as everyone knew that Washington liked to go on about farming. Stewart shook his head.

“I fear not, sir, although I gather that you are an eminent farmer. My father is a Turkey merchant.”

“How many turkeys does he have?” asked George Lake from across the table. It was almost his first comment since they had been seated. The roar of laughter in return was like a volley of musketry, it was so loud and so high. Lake shrank with embarrassment.

“Look how different the language is already,” said Stewart into the last of the laughter. “My father owns ships that trade between Edinburgh and Smyrna, in the Empire of the Grand Seigneur.”

“Goodness,” said Hamilton. “Have you been there yourself?”

“I have, too. A wonderful place, like the Arabian Nights brought to life. I went twice as a lad.”

Hamilton nodded along eagerly. Again, Stewart had the ears of the whole table.

“Did you like it much? In Turkey?” asked Fitzgerald. Stewart thought that when alone, he might ask about the women there. Everyone did. Veils made men so curious.

“All but the absolute nature of the place. The slavery had worked its way into the national fabric,” he said, and winced. The table fell totally silent.

“Polly was never a slave,” said her father, looking at her with affection. “She was born one, of course, but her mother and I were free before any man ever told her what a slave might be.”

Polly nodded. “I remember England. Most of the ladies were very kind, although I did tire of being a curiosity. Because of my color, I mean, and being from America. Other people were from America, but they didn’t have to wear a sign on their skin to say as much.”

“And you were a slave for Washington,” Marcus said.

“I met Washington once,” said Sally. They all looked at her in surprise.

“I was with Bludner. My mother was still alive then, I think. We was taking crabs on his river, an’ he came an’ near beat Bludner to death. I liked him fine.”

“Washington?” Caesar looked surprised. “He beat Bludner? I’d have paid good money to see that.”

“Who is Bludner?” asked Polly, quietly.

“He’s a slave-taker from Virginia. He almost killed me, and Virgil and Jim when you come to it, back in ’75.”

“He owned me my whole life,” said Sally, her lips trembling, and she spilled a little wine from her glass.

“He doesn’t own you now,” said Marcus White, but Sally rose and bolted out the door. Marcus made to follow but then came back. Caesar shook his head.

“I don’t know what you see in her, Reverend,” he said. “She’s been trouble since I knew her. And men get ideas, seeing you going around with her.”

“Perhaps they should get ideas if I don’t go around with her, Caesar. Do you know your Bible?”

“Not as well as you, I dare say. But I’ve read it, yes.”

“Then you know that Our Saviour spent a great deal of time with prostitutes. And soldiers and tax men, too, I think.”

Caesar bowed his head at the answer.

“It’s never as easy as you think, Caesar. No matter how hard your life has been, hers was harder. And no matter how brave you are, she has been braver. Think on that before you jibe at her again.”

Sally came back with a little powder over the tear tracks she had made, and sat composedly.

The silence dragged on. Stewart knew he could end it with an easy apology, but some part of him knew that he had wanted to say those words since he sat down with them, and that he wasn’t sorry. But he hated to seem a boor, so he attempted to change the subject.

“May I ask what kind of fish they do have in Virginia?” he asked. George Lake was white as a sheet.

Lafayette leaned forward, smiling as if he had followed this point for some time. He blinked his eyes, and Stewart suddenly knew he had an ally, someone else who had long wanted to speak out.

“I have always felt that slavery leaves an indelible mark on a country,” he said. And the silence deepened.

Hamilton turned to Stewart and shook his head.

“This is a most unfortunate subject for this table. Are you a particular enemy to slavery?”

“I didn’t think so, before,” said Stewart.

“You had a slave of your own, I think?” said Johnson.

“No, sir. A servant. Closer than servant.”

Washington spoke up from the end of the table, where he had been silent.

“A slave may be close, I think. Both the ancients and the Bible tell us as much.” Washington was careful in his speech, and Stewart realized that he was quite angry.

“Oh, aye, they do. But not as close as a true friend, surely?”

Washington considered Billy, and his fury grew. “Surely not only equality can bring true friendship? So that a slave can be as much your friend as a servant?” Washington was just civil. He knew he was berating a guest at his own table, a sin at least as great as the one the guest had committed by starting this fox, this damnable subject, at his table. And yet he realized that his views were not as simple as they had once been.

“And yet, are not these men your friends, though they also serve you?” Stewart thought, I am contending with a man at his own dinner table. Jeremy would have my head. And he thought this is the arch-rebel himself. I’ll say what I please. “And how do you know that the friendship of a slave is not compelled or feigned? A servant can leave. Even a staff officer…” He smiled, willing them to laugh.

“And can you speak in comfort of our having slaves when you attempt to impose tyranny over us by violence?” said Henry Lee.

Stewart smiled, relishing his response. He no longer cared to be perfectly civil.

“Can you speak in comfort about liberty, sir, when you keep slaves?”

Henry Lee turned a bright crimson. Lafayette leaned forward attentively.

“Yes,” he said decisively, as if he had just decided a question. “Yes. Slavery is a blot on the escutcheon of liberty that this country bears.”

Stewart feared an explosion from General Washington, but instead he appeared troubled.

“It is not a simple issue.” He looked at the table. “I once thought that it was a mere matter of property, but it does have to do with rights. And yet, if a man treats his slaves fairly…”

“They are yet slaves,” said Stewart firmly. Washington loved Lafayette like a son, and Hamilton not much behind, and Stewart felt strongly that they were both of his opinion, and it made him bold.

Washington turned on him. “What do you know of how a man treats his slaves, then?”

“I know one of yours, sir.”

Stewart suspected that if he had been hale, he’d have been summoned to a duel by half the room, but he was not daunted by their looks, although George Lake was cringing.

“Who?” like a pistol shot.

“Do you recall Julius Caesar, sir? He is now a sergeant in our army.”

Washington sat a moment, as if stunned, and looked at Stewart. He was seeing the black man at Brandywine, and the one who had taken his cloak at Kip’s Bay, and the new African boy with the scars over his eyes.

“I remember Caesar,” he said softly, as if the man were standing there himself, and Washington had just noticed him for the first time.

“Do you hate Mr. Washington?” Marcus White had asked this before, and it always seemed to fascinate him.

“No. No, I don’t hate him. I don’t love him much, either.” Caesar said, looking through the wine in his glass. “We exchanged shots at the Brandywine. Something like a duel, I think. I’ve thought that it settled something between us.”

“Do you have any happy thoughts from then? When you was a slave?” Polly asked.

“Oh, yes. I was learning a good amount every day. I had a comfortable place to live, and it was so much better than the Indies.”

“But what of Washington?”

“He was a distant master. He seldom beat a slave, and he was often fair. He never liked me.”

“Why?”

“Oh, Queeny said it was my scars.” He rubbed them.

“They do give you a savage look,” said Sally in a low voice, as if she was wooing him.

“And I had to be free.”

Marcus nodded at him, as if they had conspired together.

“Yes, it comes to you that way, doesn’t it?”

Caesar frowned, remembering. Sally looked at them both.

“How did you ‘have to be free’?”

“One day, you know you’d rather die than be a slave,” said Caesar. “Some never get it. I grew up with slaves, in Africa. Sometimes one would kill himself, or run. Now I know why.”

Marcus looked at him. “Was it injustice that moved you?”

“Perhaps it was. I just remember the little things. I was never beaten while I was at Mount Vernon. It was never a great injustice, and that is why I say that Washington was mostly fair.”

Marcus White nodded. “That’s the power that slavery has, though. To make a man’s likes and dislikes into the power of a god. A man can be the very best of masters, and yet, in a fit of temper, abuse a slave in a way he would never abuse another free man. As if slaves aren’t human.”

“What else do you remember?” asked Polly.

“He loved to farm and he loved to hunt. He was a master of both. Those skills probably make him a good soldier.”

“The first time I saw him…well, he reminded me of a soldier. He was my dogs boy. He had an eye for ground that…well, that has doubtless made him a good one.”

Washington took a glass of wine from Billy.

Stewart watched the black man, who pretended a complete lack of interest in the conversation.

Washington spoke carefully, because the subject was so great and so painful that he could not simply dismiss it. Nor was this the first time the subject had surfaced at his table, and he wondered again if he was changing.

“Slavery is an issue that will haunt us for some time, I think.”

Hamilton shook his head vehemently.”Can we allow that, sir? When even an advocate like the marquis tells us that it is a blot on our liberty?”

Henry Lee shook his head just as vehemently. “When you speak of the end of slavery, Colonel Hamilton, you speak of depriving us of our property as surely as if you’d come and burned my house.”

Stewart was seated at almost the middle of the table, and now he looked back and forth among the young men, and realized that it split them all. It was odd, as he had seen so many slaves in the north that he thought the matter was pandemic.

But George Lake, whose accent was as deeply Virginian as Henry Lee’s, spoke with quiet confidence.

“Can any man, who has fought so hard for his own liberty, sit idle while another man loses his?”

Every head turned to him, the most junior officer present and welcome mostly as the prisoner’s escort and Lafayette’s friend.

“What do you say, sir?” asked Henry Lee. In Virginia, he owned property worth thousands of pounds, and George Lake was a tradesman’s son and an apprentice, if that.

“I say, with respect, that the men who have fought this war, the handful of us who served from Morristown and will still be here at the end, we know what all these words like liberty really mean. And we know when other men who didn’t do the fighting…” He stopped, as if stricken, and muttered an apology, but Hamilton looked like to applaud.

“The ones who write the speeches and didn’t ever serve? Is that what you mean, Captain Lake?” Hamilton asked, rising a little. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

Lee looked at Hamilton with scorn.

“Free the slaves? Who will indemnify the owners? What will they do with themselves? Will they be citizens?”

“King George might have said the very thing of us, sir!”

“I think that the southern states would go to war rather than lose the full value of the property they have fought to save.”

“Perhaps, then, we can see the precious manpower they cannot spare to fight this war!” Hamilton was on his feet. “At home, guarding against some fabled revolt of their slaves while we face the cannon and the redcoats.”

He flamed red in the face. “My apologies, gentlemen. You all know I do not mean Virginia.” He turned to Captain Stewart. “And please pardon my fling against redcoats.”

“My coat is most certainly red,” Stewart said with a smile.

Washington looked down the table sternly, and shook his head.

“I think this is why we keep politics out of the mess, Captain Stewart.”

“I apologize for what I started, sir.”

Hamilton turned to him and whispered as a strained conversation covered him from up the table. “You didn’t start it, sir. They did. When they bought their human cattle.”

“Can we drink to the happy couple?” Sally asked, and Caesar glared at her.

“I haven’t asked yet,” he said sheepishly. He was enjoying the mood and the conversation, and he didn’t want to come to the point of the evening yet. In a social way, he was afraid of Marcus White, and a little afraid of Polly.

“You’re slow, then,” Sally quipped.

Caesar looked across the table at Polly, whose eyes were down, and then at Marcus White. He reached into his pocket and pulled forth a plain silver band, hammered by the armourer from a shilling. His hands were trembling.

“Sir, I have not hidden from you my admiration for your daughter, and I would like to take this occasion to ask for the honah, that is, honor of her hand,” he said. There was a quaver in his voice, but he got it out just as he had practiced it.

Marcus White waved easily at Polly. “You know that you have my consent if you have hers.”

Polly smiled. “You have mine.”

Caesar went and knelt by her, and placed his ring on her finger.

“Then I hope you will be my wife.”

“I will, Caesar.” She kissed him on the forehead and then looked into his eyes, hers huge and dark. “But my father has to tell you something first, don’t you, Father?”

“Tell me?”

Marcus White looked at her, clearly a little frightened in his turn. Caesar knew what it must be immediately, and went to shush her.

“This isn’t the place.” He looked at Sally, his distrust clear on his face. The scars made him look dangerous at such moments. “Perhaps when we’re alone.”

“This is just the place,” insisted Polly, looking up at him with steady eyes.

Marcus White looked at his daughter for a long moment.

“If I must.”

He looked around and then stood up to lock the room’s only door. Then he busied himself throwing wood on the fire.

“Caesar, you know that I have something to do with gathering intelligence for the army?”

“I do, sir. And you need say no more about it…”

“Caesar, let my father speak.” Polly put her hand on his arm and left it there. Marcus White leaned forward over the table.

“My daughter, Polly, often acts as a courier for me.” Caesar started, and he raised his hand. “No, please let me go on. I feel that you can know this because you know all the principals, and because it is time we draw this to a close. I do not so much collect intelligence as attempt to prevent the enemy collecting from us, do you understand?”

Caesar narrowed his eyes a little, but nodded. He glanced at Sally, who was looking at her hands.

“Throughout our army, the enemy has his spies. Some of them move around very publicly, because they wear the same uniform as you do but feel that the colonies have been unfairly treated. I can do little about them, and neither can anyone else.”

Caesar nodded. Many officers had sympathies with the other camp.

“The enemy also attempts to recruit spies through bribery, coercion, indeed, any method that will result in a flow of intelligence. I fear that this is not grounds for moral outrage, as I am very sure we do the same.”

Caesar continued to watch his eyes.

“Some time ago, someone who had been coerced approached me. She wanted to repent her sin. Indeed, she had little notion that I was anything but a minister of the Lord, but all her words fell on fertile ground. I took her under my wing. My daughter became her friend and confidante, because this woman was terrified all the time. I used my daughter to carry messages between us, and to follow certain people. This work was dangerous, but not as dangerous as my agent, the convert. Do you understand?”

Caesar looked at Sally. He looked at her too long, and wondered what she had passed before she became a convert, but then he smiled.

“I understand,” he said, and Polly pressed his hand. And Sally looked up, and into his eyes.

“And I understand, what you and Marcus said. One day, you jus’ can’t be a slave no more.” She looked down. “I can be a whore. Folks like you think it low, but it ain’t like being a slave.” She looked up again. “Marcus is the best thing I ever knew, except maybe Jeremy. I couldn’t have jumped essept for Jeremy. But now I’m scared all the time.”

Marcus said, “We’ve been feeding her false information for some time, and they are beginning to get on to it.”

“So they beat you,” said Caesar, bitterly. “And I thought you had been with a man.”

“Maybe I had,” said Sally. “That don’t make so much of a mind to me as it does you.”

Caesar looked at Polly, and at Marcus.

“I feared, once, that you were both spies. I even wondered which side you spied for.”

Polly kicked her father lightly.

“I told you he was quick.”

Marcus nodded. “Why?”

“You passed the lines too easily, and Polly seemed to know the headquarters, at least according to Jeremy. And you always seemed to know powerful men. I thought perhaps you were spying.”

“Slavery does not beget confidence in one’s fellows, does it, Caesar?”

“No, sir. No, it does not.”

Polly squeezed his hand again.

“Now you know,” she said.

“All’s well that ends well,” Caesar said, one of Jeremy’s favorites. And Sally gave a little sob.

“It ain’t the end for me until Bludner’s dead,” she said. And somehow her saying it robbed much of the joy of the day.