Liberty 1784: The Second War for Independence (13 page)

He glared at the women. One he noticed was rather young, fourteen at the most. More likely twelve, he thought.

“You want to ever see your menfolk again? Then you do as you’re told, you hear?”

One of the women, the oldest at maybe forty, nodded. “Why are you doing this to us?”

“Because you’re rebels, that’s why.”

“Not true,” she said. “We ain’t nobody’s people. We just want to worship our God in peace. That’s why we came here. We don’t want no part of no war. We are peaceable people of God.”

“No peace here, woman,” Braxton said, “and no God either. Now you’re gonna do as you’re told if you want your men to be alive when we leave here. Strip.”

The women gasped and stared at each other. Braxton snarled. “Either you do it or my men will rip them rags off you right now.”

“Obey him,” the older woman said and made to comply. Within a few moments, the four were naked, including the injured one who had to be helped out of her clothing. The younger one was sobbing and trying to cover herself with her hands. She had small, bud-like breasts and just a wisp of hair between her thighs. Braxton thought she was maybe twelve, and not fourteen as he’d first guessed. It excited him. He liked them young.

Braxton took the young one by her wrist and dragged her into the house and into a bedroom. He heard his men starting to have their way with the older women who began to howl in terror and pain.

He threw the girl on the bed and she punched at him, hitting his still raw face. The sudden pain was intense and nearly stopped him, but he overcame it and struck her hard until she whimpered and lay still. She screamed the first time he took her, but not the second or third. She didn’t scream again until he turned her over to his men. Not all of them took her. A few complained that she was too skinny or still a kid. He thought she was likely dead when she and the other women were piled on top of the bodies of the men and children in the barn, which was then burned. He didn’t care.

As they took off with their plunder, Braxton was satisfied. He’d wiped out another nest of rebels at a cost of two men slightly wounded. He hoped Tarleton would be pleased. Tarleton frightened him.

* * *

Will and Sarah walked arm in arm through the muddy streets of Fort Washington. There was a chill in the air, and a light snow had fallen early that morning. Nothing had stuck, but it was an unsubtle reminder that winter was almost upon them. Sarah wondered if would be appropriate or just too shocking to wear men’s trousers when the weather worsened. She had arrived with little in the way of feminine clothes and there wasn’t much available in a town that was basically a military post. She would have to ask Abigail Adams. Franklin, she was certain, wouldn’t care at all. She knew he would smile like a cherub and say she could work naked if she so liked.

“What are you going to do now,” Sarah asked Will. She knew from his already familiar actions, that something was up.

“I guess you can keep a secret,” he said with a grin. “Not that there’s any British around you’d blab to, but I’m going east. We’re going to keep people on watch at Detroit and Pitt and it’s my turn to go to Detroit. I’ll check things out for a while, be replaced, and return.”

“What do you expect to find?”

“A British army that’s growing bigger and stronger each day.”

She shuddered and not from the cold. “Then they will come for us and finally destroy us, won’t they?”

“Not if I can help it,” he said and quickly realized how foolish it sounded. How could he, one man, stop a British army? Thankfully, Sarah seemed not to have noticed it.

Sarah changed the subject. “Mr. Franklin is a great man.”

“So I’ve heard. However, isn’t he getting just a wee bit old?”

She laughed. The great man was maddeningly and intentionally imprecise as to his age. It was presumed that he was at least in his middle seventies and possibly older.

“In some ways, he is old. He tires easily and it frustrates him because there’s so much that he wants to do and feels needs to be done. In other ways, he’s a child filled with wonder at the world around him, and, in still other ways, he is a genius. Have you heard his latest?”

“No.”

“Well, after spending all his days trying to get the fools in Congress to institutionalize a form of government, he has devised a new way of making guns.”

“He what?”

“Indeed,” she said with some pride. She had become deeply fond of the old man. “It occurred to him that guns are made by gunsmiths, but that we have very few of them here at Fort Washington. Therefore, he said we had to make them without gunsmiths.”

“Sounds logical,” Will said. She was leaning against him and he could feel the pressure of her breast against his arm. Perhaps if he kept her talking they could walk forever.

“And logical it is, Will. He decided that we—I mean, the army—should only make simple weapons and that we should make them by making a large number of barrels, then make stocks and then triggers. If they were made simply enough, they should all fit together and we could make a large number of weapons very quickly.”

Will found the concept intriguing and said so. “But what sort of weapons are they?”

“He’s toyed with several types. But right now he’s working on one that almost looks like an old blunderbuss. They have broad barrels into which powder is poured, and then followed by whatever is going to be fired—lead bullets, glass, stones. He thinks the effect will be devastating at short range. Franklin’s going to have them demonstrated later.”

“I would like to see that,” Will said, and made a mental note to find out more from Tallmadge.

* * *

Major James Fitzroy was surprised and delighted when Hannah Doorn informed him that she and a woman servant were coming with him to Detroit, or at least with the army. He was unused to women making pronouncements concerning his life, but he accepted without hesitation. He was genuinely fond of her, and her presence would more than brighten up what promised to be a dismal winter in a miserable location—Fort Detroit. His planned trip to find Tarleton had been cancelled when information was received that Tarleton had gone to Detroit, instead of staying at Pitt.

Hannah also reminded him that she had business interests in Detroit, which would more than pay for any inconvenience he might feel about having to support a poor woman. She was, thank you, more than able to support herself. He’d long since concluded that Hannah Doorn was a very clever woman. She’d gotten around those laws that restricted ownership of property by women by using a cousin as a front for a small percentage. Or she simply ignored them. He’d concluded that much of the property she owned was still in her late husband’s name and no one cared.

“Damned if it isn’t strange,” he’d told Danforth over brandies, “but the Dutchie women seem to be at least as smart about business as the men are. Must be the air here in the colonies.”

Danforth pretended to shudder. “Thank God it’s different in England where women know their place, which is either in bed with their legs spread or in the kitchen with their legs together.”

Fitzroy was more than surprised to find that Hannah was in a partnership with a Jewish merchant who had a store in Detroit.

“After all,” he’d told her, “don’t they delight in cheating Christians?”

“I’ve known Abraham Goldman and his family since I was a little girl and he had a similar arrangement with both my father and my husband. I don’t think he would cheat me. Each year, I receive an amount of money as my share of the venture we own jointly.”

“I see,” Major Fitzroy had said, not certain he saw anything at all.

“And they don’t eat Christian babies either,” she’d laughed, and he happily admitted he really didn’t think they ever did.

They traveled by wagon from Albany north and then west to Oswego, a decrepit and nearly abandoned site on Lake Ontario that was being rejuvenated by the British for the coming campaign. Burgoyne commented, without apparent bitterness, that the direction they were taking took him away from the site of his defeats in 1777, at Saratoga. It was, he informed all, a part of his life that should remain closed except for the obvious lessons to be drawn from it.

Burgoyne also found Hannah Doorn quite attractive and made tentative efforts to influence her and take her from Fitzroy. When she would have none of it, Burgoyne simply shrugged, laughed it off, and went looking for another conquest. To his dismay, there weren’t any other women in the caravan available to be seduced.

From Oswego, they traveled by ship as close as they could to the falls at Niagara, where they paused, rested, and gazed with amazement on the magnificent natural wonders. Burgoyne said that he’d heard of them from travelers, but assumed the descriptions were exaggerations resulting from too much to drink. “Not any longer,” Burgoyne said. “There is nothing like them in all the world. I feel honored and privileged to be here and to have seen them.”

It was a sentiment held by Fitzroy, Hannah, and almost everyone in their traveling party of several hundred. “You’d have to be insane to not see the hand of God in those falls,” Hannah said, and Fitzroy could not contradict her. He was overwhelmed by the vision and the sound of the roaring water.

They continued by land to Lake Erie and then were jammed into a couple of small and filthy merchant ships to take them to Detroit. An eight-gun sloop, the
Viper,
escorted them. It was encouraging to realize that the Royal Navy had control of the lakes, and not the rebels. It was also incredible to Fitzroy and the others that lakes as immense as Ontario and Erie existed. Could it really be that other so-called great lakes were even greater? Even Burgoyne expressed astonishment.

On first sighting Detroit, Fitzroy was mightily depressed. A wooden stockade enclosed a number of muddy acres filled with ramshackle wooden buildings running inland from the equally muddy banks of the Detroit River. The military outpost was a little ways inland and attached to the town. It was called Fort Lernoult. Although small, the fort at least looked like someone with military experience had planned it. He’d been informed that it had eleven foot high earthen walls and contained several cannon.

A shipyard of sorts lined the riverbank where lumber was piled high and the barges that Burgoyne had ordered were under construction. News of the barges had been a surprise to Fitzroy and Danforth although, to Fitzroy’s chagrin, Hannah had known all about them from her Jewish merchant friend who was selling them supplies. Regardless, the activity on the waterfront looked like chaos.

“One spark and the whole thing would go up like an obscene parody of Nero’s Rome,” Fitzroy muttered as he took in the piles of wood, the shavings, and the dust.

His low opinion of Detroit did not rise as their ship moved against a crude dock that extended into the river and threatened to fall down as they were tied up to it. At least they would not have to wade the final few feet, or climb down into small boats, although he presumed that other, lesser mortals in the other ships would do exactly that. It was always good to be associated with the commanding officer since rank had its privileges.

Several score buildings had sprung up outside the stockade, and Hannah and her servant made for one of the larger ones while Fitzroy tried to figure out where Burgoyne was going to put his headquarters. He took in the hundreds of white tents that dotted the landscape and disrupted the lives of the farmers whose strip farms ran inland from the surprisingly wide Detroit River.

Danforth had pompously informed him that the river was technically a strait and not a river since it only ran thirty-odd miles and connected two lakes, St. Clair and Erie and, no, Lake St. Clair was named for a Papist saint, and not after the rebel general. Fitzroy told Danforth he was a bloody bore and that he’d rather have a drink than a lecture.

The tents housed the British contingent that now consisted of more than four thousand soldiers. Come spring, there would be many more. Pity the poor rebels, he thought.

* * *

Hannah entered the store owned by Abraham Goldman and looked at the items for sale. They included clothing, camping goods, pots, pans, stoves, and even some toys, although she wondered just how many children there were at the depressing outpost. Finally, she wandered over to a different section and looked at the neatly arranged stacks of cloth and blankets. She fingered several of them and nodded approval.

“Mistress Van Doorn?” inquired a small, wiry man of indeterminate age, although Hannah already knew he was in his sixties.

She smiled warmly. “Mr. Goldman, it is just plain Doorn and you know it quite well. There is no ‘Van’ in front of my name.”

Goldman chuckled. “And why shouldn’t you promote yourself? Everyone here is trying to better themselves, and what better place to begin than your name? Let them think you’re even more important than you are.”

To her surprise, Hannah thought it was a good idea. Beginning immediately, her name would be Hannah Van Doorn. She smiled sweetly. “Did you find quarters for me?”

“The army has taken everything that even resembled quality housing,” he said sadly. “First Tarleton’s officers and now Burgoyne’s will require something warm and dry for the winter. The enlisted soldiers and officers of lower rank than generals are expected to live in tents or huts.”

Hannah could not keep the dismay from her voice. “Then what will I do?” The idea of her sharing a tent with Major Fitzroy and Danforth appalled her.

“Don’t worry,” Goldman said with a laugh. “I’ve converted a portion of one of the warehouses into a bedroom with a kitchen and a study. There is even a fireplace and I will see that you are supplied with wood. I think you and your major will be quite satisfied.”

Hannah blushed. How on earth had he found out about Major Fitzroy? She fingered a cloth and pretended to examine it. “I’m sure I will be satisfied. Tell me, do you think red and white will sell well this year?”

Goldman stiffened perceptibly and hesitated. “Perhaps not as well as blue and white,” he said and asked softly, “You?”

Hannah Van Doorn smiled demurely, “And why not?”