Christian Cameron - Washington and Caesar

They gave a weak cheer, and another as they saw Washington and his staff ride out of the stuffy gloom again. Lake saw Lafayette peering down the hill at the backs of the last British light troops, and listened to them as they tried to count the casualties, and then, in the boldest moment of his life, George Lake stepped in front of Washington’s horse.

“Give you the joy of your victory, sir,” he said, amazed at his own voice. Washington looked up from a map and peered at him for a moment, and then smiled, the thin-lipped smile that never showed his teeth.

“Not much of a victory,” he said, but his men began to cheer again, and the cheer spread in waves. And then Washington’s grin split his face, and his eyes kindled and the cheers went on. Lafayette shook his hand, and then George’s, and then they were all around him, a wave of noise that spread from the center until the British could hear it two miles away.

Caesar was keeping the men together with physical threats by the time they halted, and Mr. Martin was bringing up the rear with the stragglers. But when they had rested for a few minutes and their legs stopped shaking, they took a little water and some hard tack and felt human enough to bury Jeremy.

They took turns digging as they always did, although he was just one man, and the contributions from Stewart’s company made it go fast. Some of Stewart’s men had stripped Jeremy’s boots and bloody breeches and then put on clean from his baggage, and they wrapped him in a clean linen sheet. Virgil carved him a cross from a downed branch as quick as he could, and Mr. Crawford paid the farmer in whose field they were going to plant him to get a stone. They were close to areas that their patrols would operate when they came out from New York, and Caesar thought they might get this way again. He didn’t seem able to think of much else, except that Jeremy had become a friend of a sort he had never had before. Jeremy had taught him so much. And that-like Sergeant Peters-he was dead.

McDonald came up to him and just nodded a few times, and then put Jeremy’s ivory-handled button dagger in his hand.

“He had it in his boot. We thought you ought to have it.” Some other men from Stewart’s company nodded behind him.

When Jeremy was in the ground and they had fired a volley over him, some officers came up to protest the firing, but Mr. Martin and Mr. Crawford sent them packing. Virgil, Willy and McDonald lit pipes, and they passed the tobacco around as they had for their dead since Virginia.

Caesar found that he couldn’t get the pipe into his mouth and it struck him that he was crying, great choking sobs that wracked him until Virgil put his arms around Caesar and hugged him close a moment. He hadn’t cried for Tonny, or Tom, or Peters or any of the others, but he cried for Jeremy, and Virgil sat beside him with his arm around him, as the night suddenly cooled with the passing of that awful heat.

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.”