Arundel (70 page)

We cheered when he came ashore; for there was no doubt he was a great leader, this tall, soldierly man, slender and of distinction, with the marks of smallpox heavy on his face. We could not cheer as heartily when we saw his aide, Aaron Burr, now a full-fledged captain, racing about on errands for his general like my dog Ranger when he suddenly comes on a spot where a fox has sat.

Nor was there a cheer in us for his troops, New Yorkers, little greater in numbers than ourselves and as worthless and unsoldierly-looking lot of knaves as could be found in any gutter. We were a sad-looking assemblage, God knows, after our struggle with starvation and the flux and the wilderness, nor were we any great shakes for discipline; yet we looked to be able to handle our muskets, and to endure whatever we might be set to doing, whereas these boys of Montgomery’s looked like street rabble who knew how to do nothing save draw rations.

Having seen these poor wretches of his, we were not surprised, when we paraded before him that afternoon, to hear him speak highly of our soldierly appearance. Men near me opined, beneath their breaths, that he couldn’t know much about soldiers, and that we might look more military if we had a few shirts among us; but just then the general announced in a ringing voice that to show what he thought of our exploit in marching to Quebec he would make each one of us a present of a suit of clothes and one dollar in hard money, and that we could draw these on the following day. Someone bawled, “Huzza for Richard Montgomery, our gallant general!” and such a cheering went up as must have made him think we considered him the greatest man in the world—which indeed we would have thought anyone who gave us garments to keep us warm and dry.

I have seen times when our army would have preferred to go naked rather than wear British uniforms; but this was not one of them. Those the general issued to us were British uniforms captured at Montreal, red coats and white woolen breeches and black woolen stockings and a white blanket coat to go over them, almost foppish; likewise a red cap lined with white that could be drawn down over the ears, if need be, to keep them from freezing. There was no coat big enough to fit Cap Huff. He growled and grumbled at this outrage, damning the British army for being an army of runts; but it was a circumstance for which we later had occasion to be grateful.

With the arrival of Montgomery there was tremendous activity, what with the distributing of ammunition and food, and the unloading of small cannon from the sloops—cannon so small, it seemed to me, that they might be good for the killing of geese in the guzzles of Swan Island, but no use at all for killing men inside the walls of Quebec.

With these new men we had enough to blockade the roads to the city, and so there were immediate preparations to march back again to the Plains of Abraham.

Having no wish to be once more in the bad graces of Colonel Arnold, I went with Cap Huff to the colonel’s headquarters to let him know that we were going forward to Morgan’s riflemen. We found a crowd of officers outside, Major Bigelow, Topham, Thayer, Church, Steele, Hubbard, Hanchet, and Goodrich, all of them neat in their white blanket coats and red caps.

Ogden came to the door, shouting for Captain Hanchet, and Hanchet hurried in, his lower jaw thrust forward disagreeably, and coughing a nasty, racking cough that seemed to start somewhere around his knees.

Bigelow watched him intently, and shook his head, as though there were something mislikable about Hanchet. “He was raving like a lunatic when he came up from Point Levis with his sixty men,” he said. “Told everybody Arnold was giving him all the dirty jobs.”

“What was the matter with Point Levis?”

“Oh,” Bigelow said, “bad food and no good quarters for his men, and the likelihood of being surprised and captured by the British; and it was cold, and the river might have frozen any day.”

“Yes,” Captain Thayer said, as mildly as though admiring a peruke in his own hairdressing shop, “yes, and it’s my understanding the wind was blowing, and might blow worse.”

“Oh, much worse!” Bigelow said primly, “and it might snow; and Colonel Arnold, being angry at him, might have arranged for the sun not to shine on his side of the river!”

Thayer broke off in his laughing; for from headquarters there came a shouting in Colonel Arnold’s voice. We could hear him as easily as though the windows had been open instead of sealed against the winter winds. “You’re mad!” he shouted. “Mad! There isn’t a man in this command that would say what you said! Danger! I’m ashamed to think one of my officers should speak of such a thing!”

Seemingly Captain Hanchet thrust in a reply here; for Arnold broke out again worse than before. “What if their enlistment
is
up on the first of January! This is December, I’ll thank you to remember! They’re subject to orders until midnight on December thirty-first! What do you think they are? New-born babes? By God, Hanchet, I’ll put you under arrest for this!”

There was a banging of doors from inside headquarters. The front door flew open and Arnold stood before us, his face black and lowering. “Captain Topham!” he shouted. “Captain Thayer!”

Topham and Thayer moved forward, Topham, with his rosy cheeks, looking as though he were stepping up to receive a comfit for good behavior, and Thayer as meek and mild as an underpaid schoolmaster.

“Gentlemen,” said Colonel Arnold, “our cannon must be taken from the sloops and carried to Sillery by bateaux; and the same bateaux must cross to Point Levis and return with our scaling ladders. I’m informed that this is a dangerous venture, because of the floating ice in the river. Would either of you be willing to undertake it?”

Topham looked at Thayer and said, “My men are handy with bateaux!” Thayer looked at Arnold and said, “My men are ready to start at once.”

Arnold smiled pleasantly. “In that case, gentlemen, I’ll ask you to leave it to the fall of a coin.”

The words were scarce out of his mouth when Thayer was flipping a shilling in the air.

“Heads!” Topham cried.

Thayer held out his hand, palm up, and Topham peered into it. Thayer laughed in his face, doubling up his fist and making as though to hit Topham a backhanded blow, and went in to get his orders from Arnold. Hanchet came out with a half-smile on his face, though I swear I’d never have smiled again if such a thing had happened to me; and Captain Goodrich and Captain Hubbard walked away with him down the road.

XXXI

T
HERE
was a different reception waiting for us when we returned to Quebec. Carleton, to deprive us of shelter, had burned down Major Caldwell’s manor house in which we previously lodged; and the houses in the suburb of St. John, nearest to the St. John Gate, had been destroyed as well. There was more snow, and a cold so bitter that eyelids froze together if held closed overlong. On top of everything Carleton had put cannoneers from the King’s frigates on the walls, so when we struggled to our posts through the snow we were kept busy dodging shells and grape-shot.

Headquarters was at Holland House in the village of St. Foy’s, three miles from St. John’s Gate, but many of the men were lodged in the general hospital and nunnery, a mile outside the city on the St. Charles River; for the British, out of respect for the nuns, would not shell this building. Close as the hospital was to the walls, it was too far out for Morgan and his Virginians, who had no mind to waste time marching when there was fighting to be done; and shortly after I joined the riflemen, Morgan moved them into the very shadow of the walls, quartering them in the suburb of St. Roque.

The buildings of St. Roque comprised everything from small cottages, log cabins, shops and warehouses to stone dwellings and the most celebrated inn of all lower Quebec—the Taverne de Menut, which was a godsend to us in that awful cold. The whole suburb huddled against the base of the cliff on which the city stands; and in the space between the river and the cliff were the buildings, or what was left of them, that housed the greatest thief in all America: the palace of the chief trader of the French King. The Canadians called him the Intendant; and the stone barn where he stored the King’s goods and sold them at murderous profits to the poor was called La Friponne, or The Cheat.

These were forts ready-made to our hand. Once we got into them, we could peer up at the high walls and see the sentries passing the gun ports; yet they couldn’t shoot down at us without leaning far out over the parapet; and this, they soon discovered, wasn’t healthy. Neither was it possible for them to depress their cannon sufficiently to hit us, so it gave us pleasure, each day, to slip into the ruins of the palace and La Friponne and practise our marksmanship on those who showed themselves on the wall.

We heard through spies that this diversion was considered ungentlemanly by the British; but Morgan told us to go ahead and pop off all of them we could. They’d call it ungentlemanly, he said, even though we set off a rocket whenever we took aim; for no American could ever learn to talk or act or even think in a manner satisfactory to Britishers.

Yet those damned lobster-backs on the walls, finding they could bring no cannon to bear on us, pointed mortars so to drop thirteen-inch shells on the ledges above our stations. The shells, landing on the bank with a light charge of powder behind them, would roll down against the buildings near us and explode with a crash that led us for the first time in our lives to bless the French for building walls three feet thick.

We were strewn among the wrecked rooms of La Friponne one sunny morning toward the middle of December, pecking at British sentries, and enjoying our work because the sentries stood out against the sun whereas we lay in the shadow of the cliff, when one of the gunners rolled a pill against the side of our shelter at a moment when I was lying on my stomach with my head tilted far back, and my cheek and nose pressed tight against the stock of my musket.

The bomb let off with a thunderous roar and jar that almost broke my neck. At the moment of the explosion something was hurled against me so I thought the walls had fallen on me, and left me fit for nothing but a shallow grave in the snow.

I made a move to roll over, and found a body pinning me down. I threw it off and sat up. Phoebe had fallen across me, her eyes closed and a smutch of dirt on her face, so that she gave me such a fright as I have seldom had. I hauled her up with her back against the wall, and felt her all over to see whether she was hurt. She wasn’t because in a moment she opened her eyes and said: “Why do you come to such a terrible place as this?”

“Look here,” I said, angry at the turn she had given me, “what I do is none of your business! I won’t have you coming out here! It’s all right for a man, but you might be hurt, so stay where you belong!”

These Britishers, stupid as they are, have the luck of the devil; for one of them succeeded in rolling another pill against our walls. When it burst I thought Phoebe would burrow into my side.

“What have you done with your leather belt?” I asked, for I could feel it was no longer there.

“It near froze me, Steven, so I left it off.”

“Yes,” I said, at a loss to know why I was so put out at her, for it was pleasant to have her by me again, “yes, and not content with freezing and starving and God knows what all, you must come pushing your way into this place. What is it you want? What have you come here for?”

“I came to find you.”

“Well,” I said, “it wouldn’t have hurt you to wait. It was in my mind to look for you to-night.”

“To-night might have been too late.”

“Too late for what?”

She plucked at the matted snow on the skirt of my blanket coat. “Did you know Montgomery sent a letter to Carleton asking for the surrender of the city? That Carleton won’t receive any message, or let any man come near the gates, even under a white flag?”

“Yes,” I said, “I heard so. There’s no secrets in this army!”

“Steven, I think I can carry a message to Carleton. Will you give me the horse and cariole that you brought to Pointe-aux-Trembles?”

The thought fair graveled me. “How can you get in with such a message, when nobody else can?”

“Why,” she said, “if I wear the fur coat you gave me, and a skirt, and drive up to the gate in a lather, early in the morning, with men running and shouting behind me, they’ll never think of stopping me. If I say I have important information for Carleton, they’ll let me in at once.”

She was right: no doubt of that; yet I didn’t want Phoebe mixed up in any such matter. Already there were too many people on the inside of Quebec, out of my reach, but weighing perpetually on my mind—Mary Mallinson, Guerlac, Ezekiel Hook.