Arundel (69 page)

He felt enviously of the blankets. “Any more of these left?”

“We can take you to hundreds,” Cap said. “Blankets and brandy and silver and lard and beef and French girls just itching to sew up the holes in your shirt.”

The hulking figure of Daniel Morgan bore down on us, his eyes a pale blue in the red of his face. “What’s this?” he bellowed.

“They know where there’s tons of this stuff,” the rifleman said.

Morgan thrust his hand between the feather beds. I knew he felt the bottles, but he drew his hand out empty and rocked himself back and forth, missing no detail of our load.

“What’s that?” he snapped, rapping his finger against the rolled picture.

“Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry,” Cap said. “Prettiest picture ever I saw.”

Morgan grunted. “You never saw a picture of Winchester, Virginia, then! Where’d this stuff come from?”

“Down the road a piece,” I said. “There’s provision wagons passing all the time on that road. Seems as if there ought to be some men down there to stop ’em from carrying food into Quebec.”

“One company enough?”

“Plenty! We could show you where these places are. I was kind of figuring there might be room for us in your company in case of an attack.”

“Hell, yes!” Morgan said. He took a firkin of butter and two bottles of brandy from the cariole and started away.

“Take this, too,” I said, fishing out a bottle of Beaune. “You’ll be surprised if you never had any.” He came back for it, tucked it under his arm with a growl that might have meant anything, and hurried down the road. I gave another bottle of brandy to the rifleman who had stopped us, and we trotted briskly toward Arnold’s headquarters.

“I guess it’s all right, Stevie,” Cap said, caressing his picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry. “Your trading instinct ain’t as bad as what I thought. I’d ruther fight under Morgan than under anyone except Arnold; but ain’t they the thievingest lot you ever set eyes on?”

Cap took the cariole and our belongings to hunt for Goodrich’s company while I went in to see the colonel, carrying two bottles of brandy and two bottles of Beaune hidden under my coat. Ogden was acting as adjutant, and he was a polite young man, handsome and at his ease.

“I want to see the colonel,” I said.

Ogden looked at the lumps under my coat, and winked affably, a gay and frivolous officer, and a better fighter than more serious men I have known. “There’s some gentlemen from Quebec with him just now, but as soon as they’re out I’ll put you in.”

“How did they get here?”

“Carleton turned out everyone who won’t bear arms against us.”

“How did Carleton get to Quebec?”

“Down the river,” he said angrily. “Damn him! Sailed down the day we marched here. Now we’ll have hell’s own time getting into the city. He’s smart!”

When the Quebec gentlemen came out, solid-looking men in fur hats and coats, Ogden held the door open for me.

“Well!” Arnold said when I came in, “I was looking for you to carry word to Hanchet, at Point Levis, when we started back here. I thought you must have run into the city to pay a visit to your young woman!” He said it pleasantly enough, but his face was swarthy and nubbly. I suspicioned he was not overly pleased with me or anything else.

“I was hunting Cap Huff,” I explained. “I wanted to make sure he got into no trouble with the French.”

His eyes rested on the bulges around my waist, and he nodded doubtfully. “Well,” he said, whipping out of his chair and spreading his coat-tails before the iron stove. “Any luck?”

I took the four bottles from under my coat and stood them on his desk.

“Whoo!” he said. “Beaune le Grève! 1761! Well, it might be worse! I’d rather have this than the word I just had about a friend of yours.”

“What’s that?”

“Colonel McLean and his detachment of Britishers had news of our coming while they lay in Sorel. That’s why they hurried into Quebec three days before we reached Point Levis. These gentlemen out of Quebec say the news was brought to McLean by a dirty, ragged, sour-faced white man traveling in a canoe with an Indian. There’s no doubt
it
was your friend Hook.”

We looked at each other glumly.

“When’s General Montgomery coming down?” I asked at length. He shook his head, his face lumpy and bulbous. “Soon! Soon, I hope!” He glared at me. “Great grief! You’d think it was a thousand miles from Montreal, instead of a tenth of that!” I think both of us were recalling how his starving army had followed him from Lake Megantic to Point Levis in one week’s time.

“Sir,” I said, “you know how I feel about Mary Mallinson, she that you call Marie de Sabrevois. If Carleton’s arrival puts Quebec out of our reach, I’d like to try getting in with Natanis: just the two of us.”

“By God,” Arnold said, picking up his chair and thumping it down on the floor so hard I thought the legs must shatter, “it
isn’t
out of our reach! Not if Montgomery ever gets here, it isn’t! I tell you I can take that city, Carleton or no Carleton or a dozen Carletons! All I ask is men that’ll stick with me and go where I lead them, and not go whining around about danger. Danger, danger, danger! Damn it, to hear some of these namby-pambies talk, you’d think there wasn’t any danger anywhere in the world except from bullets and cannon balls!” He flung himself into his chair and glared at me, moving his shoulders backward and forward inside his coat.

“Look here! It’s senseless for you to think of going into the city. They’d catch you, sure as shooting. Then they’d put you in prison, and you’d be nowhere. You’d never get from the Lower Town to the Upper Town. It’s like trying to climb the wall of a house without a ladder.

“Put that idea out of your head and wait till we capture it. I tell you I’m going into that city, unless all of you run away behind me! When we’re in you can go where you please and do as you please. What do you say?”

I’ve heard a mass of lies about Colonel Arnold in these last years: how he was a horse jockey and a cheat and a braggart, and how all men hated him; but I’m setting down here the things I know from following him through two campaigns. Such tales are not so, none of them. He was a brave and determined man, nor was there any soldier serving under him who wouldn’t, at his request, follow him anywhere at any time. Those who knew him had great love and respect for him, not only General Washington and General Schuyler, but all other men in his command except those who had aroused his displeasure and contempt—and God knows there were plenty to do that in those early days. Therefore I said what any other man would have said: that I’d wait. Then I went away to look for Phoebe, wishing she were well out of this numbing cold and back in our kitchen at Arundel, helping my mother hook a rug or chattering with my sisters as to what the women in Boston were wearing.

All of these towns along the St. Lawrence are eight miles apart and as like as a basketful of potatoes, some having a few more eyes than others and some having more dirt than their fellows; but all smelling the same and nearly all of them called about the same, for that matter—Saint This and Saint That and Saint T’other. They are built with a single long street; and I had no trouble finding the quarters of Goodrich’s company. The entire company was crowded around the cariole in which Cap still sat, not daring to move lest his picture be snatched from him.

When he saw me he let out a bellow of relief; and I suspected the men, thinking Cap aimed to keep everything for himself, were of a mind to take all from him, like the independent Sons of Liberty they were.

I said that we would proceed at once to a division, and appointed Noah Cluff bottle keeper for the company. We cleared a space in front of the farmhouse in which the men were billeted and then passed out the brandy and the Beaune, having twenty-two of the former and thirty of the latter; and while all the others were shouting over them and counting, I gave Phoebe the sable coat I had found in the summer house, a loose coat such as women of wealth wear in their carioles in winter. I thought, considering her fondness for a man’s breeches and sea boots, that she wouldn’t be overly excited by fripperies; but she squealed with joy at sight of it, and ran, still squealing, into the farmhouse.

After considerable bawling and bellowing it was decided the brandy should be mixed with Normandy cider according to the proportions advised by Cap Huff, and the Beaune drunk after the brandy had been consumed. We gave up the chair cushions and butter and lard for the men to divide as they saw fit, and carried the feather beds and the silver and the picture into the house for ourselves.

We found Phoebe in the kitchen, staring at herself in a cracked mirror. Her throat was creamy against the softness of the sable; and her cat’s eyes, twisted around her forehead like a band of wampum, glowed against her hair. There was a redness under the brown of her cheeks, almost like the redness of the Beaune. I would scarce have known her, turning her head from side to side and striving to see all of herself in the fragment of mirror.

When she looked around and saw me gawking, she put her hand on her hip, stuck up her nose, and walked elegantly past the two of us, turning herself a little on each foot. In passing, she opened her eyes at Cap like a frightened calf, saying,
“Oh là! M’sieu!”

Cap dropped everything and knelt on one knee, holding out his arms to her and shouting mournfully:
“On Normandee noo boovong doo
s
ee-druh!”

“Here,” I said, catching Phoebe by the arm, and noticing she was no longer the pitiful skeleton I had felt on the Chaudière, “here! Stop this nonsense! Take these things to the attic and hide them where they can’t be found.”

There was dissatisfaction at first, that night, over Cap’s drink of cider and brandy; but opinion changed as the night wore on. Among other things, the farmer’s wife danced on a table for us, jubilant and frisky, and we taught the others to sing:

Now that I think back on it, Pointe-aux-Trembles was one of the pleasantest places I have ever known.

On the last day of November we heard that General Montgomery and his troops were near at hand, together with ammunition and the clothes that had never been so needed by any body of men, I do believe, since clothes were first worn. Toward noon on the next day, the first day of December, men went running up the road toward the point, their huge, rough, hay-stuffed moccasins flapping and padding in the snow as though they wore saddle bags on their feet. At the point we found three armed schooners, all loaded with troops, and on one of them the general.