Arundel (73 page)

“Lot you know about it!” growled the butcher from York.

Phoebe darted to him through the men as quickly as a mackerel gull dives into a breaker for a sand eel. “Don’t I!” she cried, standing a scant six inches from him. “Don’t I! I know the way to fight is to fight! What was it you came up here for? To see how far you could walk?”

The butcher from York turned away. She caught him by the sleeve and turned him back again. “Go ahead! Let’s have the rest of it, now you’ve started shouting it’s a lot I know about it! Did you come up here to fight or run?”

“There ain’t no woman going to talk to me like that,” the butcher said, his face redder and shinier than ever.

“Why, bless me!” said Phoebe, standing up to him like a bantam, “you don’t mean to say you
can
fight if you don’t like the way I talk, do you? Not
fight!
Not with your enlistment running out in a week! You’ve got to go home in a week! You couldn’t run the risk of getting hurt before then, could you?”

Noah Cluff laid his hand on her shoulder. “Phoebe, they’s some things you don’t understand, I guess.”

“Is that so! Is that so! What is it that’s so clear to you mental giants, but beyond my comprehension?”

“Now, Phoebe,” Noah said, patting her as one might soothe a restive horse, “you know the colonel’s a hard driver, and if so be we got to serve under him—”

“Don’t say it!” she cried, taking Noah by the front of the coat. “Do you suppose I don’t know what you’re going to say, and where you got it? All that stuff comes from Hanchet. Every last scrap of it comes from Hanchet! Hanchet, the man that’s got a grievance! You remember the time the pumpkin pies were stolen at Fort Western, and how Hanchet came whining around after them? He made a personal grievance out of it! Yes, and he did the same thing when Arnold took all the bateaux and hurried to Sartigan to get food for the rest of us. He didn’t worry about how much
we
needed food, or how near
we’d
come to dying if somebody didn’t hurry to get it for us! Not Hanchet! We could die and be damned for all he cared! The only thing worried him was the way Arnold seized his bateaux. He was insulted! When he was put in command on Point Levis, it was a personal grievance! When Arnold asked him to take down the cannon it was a personal grievance! Did he think about helping us, or helping the colonies? He did not! He thought about his nasty little self with his sticky-out jaw! You’ve got a gall to tell me I don’t understand it! How many Treeworgys and Hanchets are we going to have in this army to keep us from taking Quebec?” She stamped her foot. “I understand a cry-baby when I see one, and that’s what Hanchet is! He’s a cry-baby! He’s got Goodrich and Hubbard to crying with him; and now you’ve begun to cry because you see your captains crying.”

“ ’Tain’t so,” said Butts from Wells, and his Adam’s apple moved convulsively. “What I say is, an enlistment’s an enlistment. We enlisted till the fust of January, and what they’re trying to do is get us into a fix where the fust of January won’t mean nothing.”

“Nothing at all!” said the red-faced butcher.

“Nothing at all, like your talk,” Phoebe said. “I never heard the beat of it! According to your argument, you wouldn’t eat your Thursday supper if you didn’t get it till Friday morning. You know as well as I do that if you’d been asked to enlist to the first of February instead of the first of January you’d have done so. You’d have enlisted for a year! Now you’re whining you can’t fight because you got to go home the first of January!”

She whirled on Noah Cluff. “Are you going to fight or quit?”

“I don’t rightly know, yet, Phoebe,” Noah said slowly.

“What about you?” she asked Nathaniel Lord.

“Why,” Nathaniel said, “I came up here to fight; so if others decide they can’t, I’ll go with Dearborn’s company.”

“How about the rest of you?”

From some of them came a grumbling murmur; from most of them, silence.

“Well,” Phoebe said, “let me know when you make up your minds. As long as there’s any doubt, I’m ashamed to be seen anywhere near you. I’ve got to look out for my reputation. Come on, Steven.”

Phoebe and Jacataqua and the yellow-faced dog went back to St. Roque with me, and I got them a lodging with Mother Biard, an old brown-faced French woman who lived in a log house stuck against the cliff like a sea urchin against the side of a pool, not three minutes from the Taverne de Menut. She sold charms, which was how I came to know about her. I have no faith in such matters, but her charms were too cheap to be passed lightly by. For one shilling she would sell a charm certain to bring its owner safe to the one he loved, or so she said. I bought one from her, since she declared she would give back the money if the charm proved ineffective. I have it still, tucked in the corner of my green seaman’s chest.

XXXII

I
F THE
liquors we drank at Menut’s tavern had proved one tenth as false as the tales we heard there, the defenders of Quebec might have thrown away their muskets, for we would have been poisoned and helpless in no time at all.

It was a pleasant place, this tavern, on a December night with the northwest wind whining across the St. Charles and setting the snow dust to whispering against the broad front door and the little diamond-shaped panes of its windows. On the ground floor was a big room, walled with rough plaster and timbered overhead with oak beams as broad as Cap Huff. Two deep fireplaces yawned at each other across the room; and at the back was a door into the kitchen, flanked on one side by a staircase and on the other by a handsome broad bar behind which stood Moshoo Menut himself when he was able to stand, which was not often. The staircase led to a large upstairs room with two fireplaces and gaming tables, where, according to the boasts of Moshoo Menut, all the bloods of Quebec and the garrison did their gaming before we arrived. That was the only name by which Cap would address Menut—Moshoo. It was American French, he said, and he liked to speak American French; whereas Frenchified French, like the word Menut, sounded so namby-pamby he was ashamed to say it.

When we started coming to the tavern the walls were covered with proclamations in French from the old days, and flyspecked ballads brought from French ports by sailors. Among them was a pompous printed sheet signed by McLean, the commandant of Quebec, telling what fine things would be done for any man who would enlist in the Royal Highland Emigrants to fight against the rebels. He would be given two hundred acres of land in any province of North America, with fifty acres extra for his wife, if he was married, and fifty for each child, and a present of one guinea on enlisting.

All the proclamations and ballads we carried away with us, but this sheet we left; for the men took pleasure in spitting neatly around it on entering or leaving the room, so it was framed in a dark wreath that grew constantly darker.

God knows where the men got the information they passed out so freely at Menut’s—how more than fifteen hundred French folk in the city were ready to join us if we should ever get in; how Montgomery was going to allow each one of us eight hundred dollars in loot if we should take the city; how five hundred scaling ladders had been constructed to replace the overshort ones built at Point Levis; what Hanchet had last said to Captain Goodrich about Colonel Arnold; and how the British were sending trollops from the city infected with smallpox so that more of us might catch it.

That’s the way with most soldiers: they believe anything, no matter how wild, and can’t rest until they unburden themselves of their misinformation. We were uneasy at the loose talk we heard, and doubly uneasy over the manner in which a man here and a man there deserted to the British each day. Since new scaling ladders had been made, we knew plans must be afoot to make an attack on the walls; and even Cap Huff, with all his recklessness, could see we might find ourselves in a mess if the British, thanks to our deserters, got wind of our attack.

“It ain’t safe,” Cap said angrily, “it ain’t safe, the way they talk! By God, Stevie, if they ever make me a general, I won’t have nobody in my army but deaf and dumb soldiers that can’t read or write! I’ll take ten thousand men like that and knock the daylights out of all the men that England can send over here—yes, and France and Russia too!”

I had gone to the tavern with Cap, the day after Phoebe returned, to get warm and to show him the drawing that Arnold’s friend, Mr. Halsted, had made for me of the location of Guerlac’s house. I was determined Cap should have this plan in his mind, so that if anything happened to me in the attack, he could go for Mary and bring her away.

I drummed it into his thick head while he gulped down his Normandy cider with brandy; how, after ascending the long flight of steps from the Lower Town to the Upper Town and coming into the Market Place that lies before the cathedral, we must turn sharp to the right and walk one hundred and thirty paces; turn to the left into a narrow street; walk eighty paces along it; turn to the right and walk thirty paces down a steep incline and thus come to Guerlac’s house, a one-story house with an arched bombproof roof, on the right-hand side of the street.

“What’s the name of the street?” Cap asked, calling for more cider.

“Never mind the name. All you’ve got to know is that you go thirty paces along it.”

“Suppose we come at it from the other end?”

“You poor fool!” I said, “you
cant,
if you don’t know the name. All you can do is climb into the Market Place and start counting. To the right, one hundred and thirty; to the left, eighty; to the right, thirty.”

“You want to get the name of the street,” Cap said.

Before we came to words over it the door of the inn opened and Captain Smith of the Pennsylvania riflemen stumbled in, kicking snow from his moccasins. What it was that set me against Smith I think was not one thing, but many, including the manner in which he was known to have slaughtered the Indians in Lancaster Gaol, and the way he wet down his black hair on his low forehead, and the way he gabbed, gabbed, gabbed with anyone that would listen to him, as well as for his suspicion of me on Seven Mile Stream. At all events, I had no love for him; so I watched him when he came in, and thought to myself he was in liquor from the way he lifted up his feet too high off the floor.

Instead of going upstairs, as was customary with the officers who came to Menut’s, he walked over to a table where there were some of his own men, among them a young volunteer cadet officer named Henry, a good woodsman. Smith clapped Henry on the shoulder, laughed foolishly, and said thickly: “Now you boys got something to keep you busy! We’re going to attack. Yes, sir, we had a council! Were going to attack! ’Bout time, too, if you ask me! If we hadn’t, those lousy Easterners would have run away and left us flat on our backsides.”

I could see young Henry redden at the freedom with which this information was thrust on him. A baby, I thought, would have known better than to talk in a public place of what had been decided in a council of war.

The men at the table stared down at their drinks, saying nothing. The rest of the drinkers in the room were silent as well. Smith unknotted the sash of his blanket coat, and swayed on his feet, as if wondering what to say next. Then he chuckled. “Going to attack: and when we
do
attack, they won’t forget it in a hurry! You know what we’re going to do? There’s going to be a false attack at St. John’s Gate; and while it’s going on, Arnold and the rest of us’ll go into the Lower Town through St. Roque, and Montgomery by way of Cape Diamond. Yes, sir! When we meet we’re going to catch the women and the priests and the children and put ’em in with the troops and march up the steps into the Upper Town! Let ’em try to stop us
then,
by God!”

Such a stillness had fallen on the room that we could hear, in the fireplaces, the hissing of the sap boiling from the ends of the logs. Young Henry’s chair scraped on the sanded floor. He stood up, a fresh-faced, curly-haired boy. It was plain to be seen he was sorely distressed by his captain. “Sir,” he said protestingly, “sir—”

Smith gave him a jovial slap that forced him back into his chair. “Yesh! It’ll be on you ’fore you know it! You know when we march? It’sh—”

He hiccuped. His eyes wandered, as if noting the unwinking stares fixed on him. He seemed to take pride in being the center of interest.

Cap drained the cider from his mug of shiny black earthenware, stood up quickly astride his chair, and threw the mug at Smith, hard and straight; but hard and straight as he threw it, he was not quick enough. While the mug was in the air we heard the words “Tomorrow night!” Then the mug shattered against the back of that hard, round head, and Smith went down on the floor.

On the moment every man’s tongue was wagging. Fingers were pointed at Cap, who had sat down immediately and was bellowing loudly for more cider. It seemed to me it might be well for us to make a run for it through the kitchen; but before I could suggest it there was a clattering on the stairs and down came Major Bigelow, followed by Captain Thayer and Captain Topham.

“Here, here!” Bigelow said. “What’s going on here?” He pushed through the men, who were crowding up toward Cap in a way I misliked. “Who did this?” he asked, looking down at Smith.

A dozen hands pointed at Cap.

“Well, for God’s sake!” Bigelow said, staring at us. “What happened?”

“Major,” Cap said, “it was an accident.”

There was a murmur of protest. “He up and threw it!” cried a little weasel-faced man from one of Montgomery’s regiments.