Arundel (83 page)

“Thayer told us they were afraid of sending the smoke and flame down on Montgomery.”

Arnold nodded moodily. “Montgomery wasn’t a child! He could have looked out for himself if he’d been in the Lower Town instead of dead in the snow.”

“Sir,” I said, “I wished to God a hundred times you could have been there.”

Arnold nodded again. “We’d have kicked up a dust somehow.”

“What would you have done?”

“God knows,” he said wearily, “because I don’t know how good your information is. There’s one thing about it: prisoners or no prisoners, I’d never have stood four hours behind the second barrier and done nothing. If you’re out to do something there’s one sure way of not doing it, and that’s by doing nothing. I’d rather be killed doing something than do nothing and come off safe.”

He looked at me reflectively. “I can’t tell what I’d have done. The time to decide such things is when the decision must be made; not before. With Morgan and his Virginians to follow me, and no one to stop us at the barrier, I’d have put the Lower Town in a blaze and got free somehow.”

He shook his head and laughed. “Fortunes of war! We’ll have them yet! Get on with your tale.”

I told him the rest of it. When I had finished he lay silent, fingering a rip in the blanket. A wounded soldier in a near-by bed broke into a hiccuppy sobbing, like a child recovering from a spell of weeping, and called loudly for his mother.

“Sir,” I said, “what happened to Montgomery?”

“Well,” he said slowly, “it’s too soon to be sure of these things. He attacked at Cape Diamond when we attacked through St. Roque. The carpenters sawed posts out of the first stockade, and Montgomery led the New York troops through—Montgomery and his aides: Captain Cheeseman and Captain McPherson and Captain Burr. There was a cannon loaded with grape beyond the stockade, and there was one shot fired before the British guards ran. One shot, and because the path was narrow and the attackers crowded together, it killed Montgomery, Cheeseman, McPherson, and a dozen soldiers.”

He fell silent again, fingering the rip.

Cap cleared his throat, like a mill saw striking a pine knot. “Is that all?”

“Yes. That’s all. They marched back to St. Foy’s. It seemed too dangerous to go on.”

“Who led them back?” Cap asked, growing redder and redder, as though on the edge of exploding.

“Lieutenant Colonel Donald Campbell of the New York Line,” Arnold said.

“Lieutenant Colonel Donald Campbell,” Cap repeated. “I guess Lieutenant Colonel Donald Campbell of the New York Line disremembered the rest of us might be caught in a box if he didn’t get on. If you want to know what I think—”

“Fortunes of war!” Arnold said again. He pulled at the rip in the blanket.

“Be damned to that!” said Cap loudly. “We could have taken the city if he’d had the gizzard of a louse! I s’pose if you’d been in Lieutenant Colonel Donald Campbell’s place you’d have run back to St. Foy’s, screaming it was too dangerous! Like hell you would! If you want to know what I think—”

Arnold looked up at Cap’s shining red face and laughed heartily. “The first thing you must learn in this business they call war
is
that when a thing’s done, it’s done. Forget it and lay your plans for the next step! If a soldier kept his mind on the things he lost through others’ blunders, he’d go mad.”

“All right,” Cap said, sticking out his great barrel of a chest as if to drum on it, “but I know damned well you’d have gone ahead, if you’d been there! The troops would have gone too, even those pie-faced New York rats. What I think about this Lieutenant Colonel Donald Campbell is that he and Roger Enos ought to get into petticoats and sell gingerbread cakes up an alley! It’s all they’re good for! Why, our Phoebe would have done better than this Lieutenant Colonel Donald Campbell of the New York Line!”

Arnold nodded as Cap’s ferocious explosions faded to grumblings and sputterings. “I have no doubt she would. She’s a smart young lady. Smart as they come! She’ll make a good wife for some man.” He looked hard at me. I felt myself go as red as a British coat.

“She’ll make a good wife for me if I can ever find her.”

“Ho ho!” Arnold cried, “you waked up at last, did you? She told me years ago you had a fondness for her, but didn’t know what ailed you. She said you had this pale-faced wench of Guerlac’s on the brain like a maggot.”

I moved uncomfortably and said nothing.

“As to finding her,” said Arnold, hitching himself into an easier position, “she came into this hospital at noon to-day to look for her townsfolk among the wounded, and to tell me you told her to go home. If I’m any judge you haven’t lost her, any more than a child can lose its mother.” He laughed, a familiar mocking, adventurous look in his eyes.

“I hope to God you’re right!” I said. “For all she knows, I’m dead. Once before she married the most childish man in our town, though why she did it, if she’s as smart as you say she is, I don’t know. If she did it once, she might do it again before I catch up with her.”

“So,” Arnold said, moving his wounded leg under the bedclothes and wrinkling his face with the effort, “she never told you why she married him! You surprise me!”

From the derisive way he said it, I could tell I didn’t surprise him at all. The whole thing was beyond me. I felt weary, and wishful of seeing Phoebe.

Arnold picked up Guerlac’s sword and went to snapping it in and out of the sheath. “Here,” he said, “why don’t you do this? Why don’t you go up the river a few miles above Pointe-aux-Trembles, where the ice is solid and a path cut through the blocks in the middle? That’s where she has to go to cross. You can catch her there.”

He scratched his chin and popped out his pale eyes at me, struck by an idea. “No! I’ll do more than that for you! What do these Indians of yours consider the shortest route to Boston, and how long would it take to travel it?”

I already knew the answer. “They say,” I told him, “that the passage of the army up the Kennebec and down the Chaudière has made a road that, with this snow, will be as smooth and level as our beach at Arundel. On snowshoes we could easily reach Boston in two weeks unless we met heavy storms, which isn’t likely.”

“Good!” Arnold said. “I’ll send you express to Cambridge with dispatches for General Washington, all four of you. You can catch up with this Phoebe of yours and give her an escort to her home. She deserves one, after what she did for us.”

“Sir,” I said, “I’m mighty grateful.”

“I know,” he said, “and I’m grateful too.” He opened his field desk, screwed together his saucer candlesticks, and kindled his candles from the one on the stool beside him. “Go out and wait in the hall, I’ll send for you when I’ve finished. You’ll want orders.” He scratched names on a sheet of paper, but hesitated over one. “Huff! I never learned your first name. What is it?”

Cap looked at his feet uncomfortably, so I was moved to answer for him. “Saved From Captivity.”

“Was he indeed!” Arnold said politely. “And what’s his first name?”

“That’s it. Saved From Captivity. It means nothing to any man unless written plain Cap.”

Arnold snorted pleasantly. “Plain Cap it is.” He waved us into the hall; and as we went, I saw Cap was in a black mood because of this airing of his name, and eager to vent his spleen on anyone that came to hand.

XXXVI

I
MIGHT
have clapped my arms around the first nun that passed, such was my delight over this providential stroke of fortune that would take me both to Phoebe and to Arundel, had we not encountered Burr in the hall—Captain Burr, to give him the new rank to which he had been elevated by Montgomery. He was asking to see his friend Matthias Ogden, and looking mighty important, after the manner of small men.

He pursed up his lips when he saw us, and nodded ominously, as though he took a gloomy pleasure in adversity.

“By God,” he said, “I never thought to see you alive and free! We heard all of you who weren’t killed or wounded were captured. Now you can tell me where I can find that slippery hussy Jacataqua.” Cap glowered at him, having come to mislike him even more than I, but I was in a state of mind to give any man a fair answer. “What you heard is about true,” I said. “I think we’d either be wounded or captured if we hadn’t got into the Upper Town by good luck and squared accounts with Treeworgy and the man who hired him.”

“The Upper Town!” he exclaimed, and whistled. From the look in his sallowish pretty face, he doubted what I said.

Wishful of having no trouble with any man, and above all with an officer, now that we were on the edge of leaving this snow-ridden land, I was content to nod and grin at him, and wish heartily he would get along in to his friend and leave us be. Yet Cap couldn’t remain quiet, but must hitch at his breeches and rub at his face with his hairy hands, a sure sign a storm was rising within him.

“I think more of us could have gone up,” I said, hoping to forestall Cap, “except for Montgomery’s misfortune at Cape Diamond.”

Burr pressed his lips together. “It was awful! A terrible business! Montgomery and Cheeseman and McPherson dead at the first shot, and a score more groaning in the snow! I swear fifty grape-shot passed me within a whisker’s width!” He slapped the fist of one hand into the palm of the other. “And Campbell, rot him, would not go forward!”

“It don’t sound good!” Cap growled. “How far from you was Montgomery when he got it?”

“Not ten feet! He went down like a tree, and never moved nor made a sound.”

Cap grunted. “A lousy Frenchman in the Upper Town told us all Montgomery’s men ran like whipped dogs when he was killed: never even tried to pick him up and carry him away.”

He stared at Burr and Burr stared at him, both of them motionless. “Why,” said Burr at length, dropping his head and peering at us from under his eyebrows, so that he looked a little like a snake, “he was a liar! We could see nothing, any of us! You don’t know how dark it was, with the howling wind and the snow!”

“Oh, don’t we!” Cap exclaimed. “What do you think we were doing when all this happened? Reading a book? There was plenty of snow where we were—plenty; but we could see well enough to take Arnold back to the hospital and fight our way into the Lower Town, too! And they tell me those at Cape Diamond could see well enough to find their way back to the hole in the stockade! How big was that hole, anyway? Just about the size of Montgomery, wasn’t it?”

“Are you meaning to accuse me of cowardice?” Burr asked softly.

“No,” I said, laying hold of Cap’s arm to twist some sense into him, “no, he’s not! No man’s a coward who came here with Arnold.” We heard Arnold calling us from the main room. “I’ll tell you when I come out,” said Cap to Burr in a whisper so hoarse and rasping that it seemed to flutter the white headgear on a pair of passing nuns. We went back to Arnold, and found him dropping wax on his letters.

“Saved From Captivity,” he said, not looking up, “I want you to put a curb on your tongue. To say what you think is always a luxury and often a curse; for since you’re only human, like the rest of us, your thoughts, a large part of the time, are doubtless wrong.”

He pressed his thumb against a lump of hot wax and looked coldly at Cap. “You don’t know what went on in the dark at Cape Diamond, any more than I know what you have in your pockets to bulge them out. It’s not your place to talk of cowardice to your equals, let alone to your superiors. If you must fight, fight the British. Let your own people alone. Do you understand this, Saved From Captivity?”

“Well, my Gosh—” Cap began, puffing heavily. He gulped and tried again. “I never liked—” Once more he started afresh. “Yes, sir!”

“Good,” Arnold said. “I’ll appreciate it if you’ll apologize to Captain Burr when you go out. We’ve all of us had troubles enough this day without adding to them by hasty speech.” In his impatience he spoke more roughly. “You big damned fool! Aaron Burr is just about the nerviest little gamecock in the army!”

He handed me the letters. “These to be handed to His Excellency in person. You can draw what rations you need. It may be we have a little hard money left.”

“Why,” I said, feeling uncomfortable, “we were so fortunate as to find some of that in—in Quebec, so we need none.”

“Ah!” said Arnold noncommittally. “In that case be off soon, and make all possible speed. Give out no news except to General Washington. I’ll be on my feet in three months’ time. If they can spare me the men, I’ll take this city as sure as there’ll be green leaves in May.” He shook hands, quick and impatient, as if glad to be rid of us, though I knew better.

“Here,” he said, as I turned away. “I forgot something!” He opened a drawer in the back of his field desk and took out a seal ring set with a fat green stone. There was a coat of arms cut in the stone, and Arnold showed me the motto at the bottom of the seal
—Gloria mihi sursum.
“Glory above all things,” he said, a reckless light in his pale eyes. “Give this to your Phoebe, and tell her it’s a wedding present from a sincere admirer.”

He wagged his hand and we went out, leaving behind us a brave and gallant gentleman who, if it had not been for the terrible thing that later happened, would be acknowledged by all soldiers to be second only to General Washington in daring and brilliance in military matters. He had all the qualities of a great soldier—observation, right judgment, quickness, leadership, determination, energy, and courage—and all of them, it seemed to me, in the highest degree.