Christian Cameron - Washington and Caesar

“Are you a friend of our lodger, young man?” she asked.

“I am, ma’am,” he said, making a leg as Jeremy had taught him. She nodded as if it were her due.

“Do your friend a service then, young man. Tell her that I will not have a lodger who makes a nuisance! And that goes doubly for a black one. I don’t care how solid her money is.”

Caesar bowed. He had learned from Jeremy how useful these courtesies were for hiding one’s thoughts.

“And no male visitors in the evening, or she is out. I told my husband that it was a mistake to take your kind in here.”

He bowed again. He felt Jeremy’s voice in his head, and he smiled.

“What kind is that, ma’am?”

She looked at him and shook her head as if it was a matter of little importance.

“What visitor did she have?”

“Now that’s a proper question for a brother to ask of his sister, I’m thinking.” Caesar wasn’t sure what he thought of being Sally’s brother, but he let it pass. “A little white man. I didn’t like his looks, and I’m certain he hit her. What do you think of that, young man?”

He shook his head.

“Hmmf. As I thought. None of us is any better than God made us, I expect. But I want her quiet or gone, do you hear?” She nodded vigorously and shut the door.

Caesar shook his head at his own thoughts as he went up the stairs and knocked.

Sally answered. She was in a shift, and drunk.

“I heard Jeremy’s dead,” she said. He smelt the rum on her. She was naked under the shift, and yet he was quite unmoved by it, because she was so clearly distraught.

“He is,” Caesar said, coming into her room.

“I loved him.” She sat on her bed, a fancy canopy bed from a shop. Her trunks were mostly unpacked on the floor. Her lip was split and she had a bruise on her face and another on her naked shoulder. Caesar nodded easily. He had suspected that Sally was sharing the master and the man, but it hadn’t been his place to say, and Jeremy had never even hinted. Jeremy could be very closed about things.

And Caesar wasn’t too sure he believed Sally, either. She might just love him now for the drama. She was not a simple woman.

“And Captain Stewart?” Caesar asked. He was surprised at himself, because he didn’t care. He didn’t want to know.

“I think I love him a little,” said Sally. “Don’ tell me he’s dead too.”

“No. He’s a prisoner, but Mr. Martin says he’s already on the list to be exchanged. Polly said that he needs shirts and the like, and thought you’d help make him up a package to send through the lines. There’s a cartel going tonight.”

She started at the words through the lines.

“What’s a car-tel?” she asked, a little listlessly.

“A flag of truce,” he said. He was suddenly suspicious of her, as he had been of Lark in the swamp and of Marcus White. “Who hit you, Sally?”

She just shook her head. “A man,” she answered, as if that was all the answer that was needed.

Caesar shook his head in weary disgust. “You loved them, but you went and found a man? And he hit you? What does Polly see in you, or Reverend White?”

She was crying again, drunken tears that could have been real or fake.

“I don’ know, Julius Caesar.”

He looked around the room, at the wreck of her trunks, and smelled the reek of the rum.

“We’re going to clean this room. And you. And we’re going to find the captain some shirts and suchlike, so that he thinks his mistress likes him enough to bother.”

Sally just sat on the bed, shaking with sobs. She was hiding her eyes, and it almost seemed that she was laughing. He shook his head.

“Your landlady wants you gone. How are you going to explain that to him? You want to go back to Mother Abbott’s? Or just lean your back against a building an’ get it done with any sailor trying to make his tide?” He was harsh, and she just sat, her head down, until he finished. Then he went to get Polly. He wanted to slam the door, because it would have made him feel better, but he was afraid the noise would be the last straw for the old woman downstairs.

Stewart got himself up and put on a lovely clean shirt with the embarrassed help of Mrs. Holding. It was one of his own, but someone had rinsed it in lavender and pricked his initials into it since he had sent it north with the shipboard baggage, and he smelled it carefully. It had to be Polly. She could sew, and she took care in matters like this. Sally might dance and talk and drink, but her sewing didn’t run to these fine stitches. He smiled, though, because the perfume on the note had been Sally’s, although the note was in Caesar’s square military hand with another from Simcoe and yet a third from Crawford, all enough to make him dab at his eyes.

And there was a note from Miss McLean. It was a cheerful missive about the turning of summer in the Highlands, the sounds birds made, and her eagerness to be with him. It, too, had a little scent attached. From his bedside, he could read her note and smell her scent, and smell Sally’s, and feel little guilt. Just sorrow, really. He had taken a black mistress because it had seemed less a betrayal than taking a white one. But now, at a distance, he found that he liked Sally fine, and that Jeremy’s death freed him from the guilt of it. It made no sense, but it was fact.

“Your friends, sir?” asked Mrs. Holding. She wanted to get him dressed so that she didn’t have to dally with a man in just breeches and a shirt.

“Just so, ma’am. If you could maneuver that waistcoat round my bandage? Well done. And a stock? Yes, I think they included a buckle.”

She held up his best paste buckle, a magnificent square of dazzling jewels set in silver. He had bought it behind Jeremy’s back. Jeremy thought it vulgar.

“Goodness me, sir. I’ve never seen such a thing. And this is for a man?” She looked at it with something between admiration and horror. “You’ll not see its like in Bergen County!”

“I didn’t think I would,” he said pleasantly. She got the stock buckled.

“And to think you are going to dine with General Washington,” she said, reverentially.

“Yes,” said Stewart, as she tried to fuss with his hair. “Yes, it’s quite an honor for him.”

She struck him gently on the shoulder. “You are quite a card, I find. Quite the young spark.”

He tried not to wince as she tugged at his hair. It made him think of Jeremy, of course, and yet he smiled. Sometimes, thinking of Jeremy made him smile. He opened the letter from Simcoe, and a page from Rivington’s Gazette fell out. He shook it open one-handed and read through the items until he saw the notice that he had been wounded and captured, with a little star beside it, and then it struck him that he had been mentioned in dispatches. He smiled. He flipped it over and saw the quote of the dispatch, a very pretty piece of nonsense that mentioned him in a most heroic light.

Poor Jeremy would have loved this moment, he thought. He put it with Simcoe’s unread letter as he heard Captain Lake ascending the stairs.

Lake put his head round the door and smiled.

“So you are well enough to come?” He seemed very nervous.

Stewart laughed. “A little banged about, but nothing that should worry Mr. Washington.”

“You mustn’t call him that, John.” Lake shook his head. “It makes him that angry.”

Stewart bowed to hide his smile.

“Perhaps you can relieve Mrs. Holding of the odious duties of helping a man to dress by holding that coat, George,” he said easily, and Mrs. Holding chuckled at him.

“He’s been difficult all afternoon, sir,” she said. “I think it the great pity of the world that you have to go and exchange him so that he’ll go back to shooting at you directly.”