Arundel (84 page)

This, too, I must add, because it’s the truth, though a truth that displeases many: in none of my readings have I ever learned of anyone so persecuted and disappointed and unrewarded as this same brave and gallant gentleman. If the commissioning of officers had been in the hands of General Washington, where it should have been, instead of in the hands of the petty little argufiers of Congress, Benedict Arnold would never have suffered the cruel injustices that were heaped on him until, weakened by wounds, he was coaxed or driven to his awful crime.

There was no more swagger to Cap when he stepped into the hall to ask Burr’s pardon than there is to a wet dish-towel; but there was no one in the hall save the sentry and two nuns with their heads together over a pile of bandages. When I would have asked Captain Burr’s whereabouts from the sentry, Cap stopped me. “To hell with him!” he said in a rasping whisper. “If we get out of here fast enough we may never have to look at his liver-colored face again.”

In a quarter-hour’s time the four of us were stowed snugly in a cariole, jangling through the snow toward Pointe-aux-Trembles; and it was many a long day before our paths were crossed by Aaron Burr.

The leather-faced French made us welcome at the small hotel of Pointe-aux-Trembles, filling us full of roasted chicken and cider, even though it was midnight when we drew up before it. Snowshoes they said they’d get for us in the early morning, and blankets and provisions and all the things we needed for our march; and so we slept in peace. I, for one, felt as though I’d broken from a tomb that had been all but sealed over me.

I woke with a start a little before dawn, mindful of the silver knives and forks that had come from the summer house at Sillery; and something possessed me to go alone in search of them. I left Cap on his back snoring fiercely, and set off down the single street of Pointe-aux-Trembles for the farmhouse where Goodrich’s troops had been quartered when we lay there waiting for Montgomery.

There was smoke rising from its chimney against the dull gray sky, and a gleam of light at the windows; so I pushed open the door and went into the kitchen. A long-queued Frenchman and his family stood near the stove, watching an Indian roll a blanket into a pack. He looked up at me. It was Sabatis. There were two other blankets by him, unrolled, and a coat of sable fur. The dog Anatarso sat on a corner of one of the blankets as if possessed of dower rights in it. I knew, when Sabatis nodded gravely at me, that we had already come up with Phoebe and Jacataqua, and that Sabatis must have deserted Eneas and come back like a faithful dog to his true friends.

Phoebe, I thought, would be in the attic uncovering my silver. I went up the ladder at the side of the room, opened the trapdoor at the top, and stepped up onto the floor.

At the far end of the attic I saw Jacataqua digging in the thatch. In the middle of the barren square space was Phoebe, on her knees before a double row of silver. I thought to call to her, but there was a fullness in my chest and throat, most embarrassing.

Although I made no sound, she suddenly looked over her shoulder into my face. She turned away, as though to find Jacataqua; then whirled to stare at me again. It seemed to me my appearance was strange to her, or not to her liking.

I looked down at my blanket coat, to make sure it was properly belted, and felt of my face, which had less beard than usual, because we had shaved before we fought. Finding these things in order, I rid myself of the tightness in my throat and chest by main force and said, though it was not at all what I wished to say, that I had come to see whether the silver was still here.

She scrambled to her feet, small and straight in her gray blanket coat and blue sash, her French snow leggins over her gray breeches, and her little fur cap pulled tight over her hair. She looked, in that shadowy, cold room, like a half-grown boy. She came up to me and put her hand against my chest, then nodded, twining her fingers in the string of cat’s eyes at her throat.

“It’s all here,” she said, “and Cap’s picture. I was going to take it home. Do you want me to take it home? Shall I—shall I take Cap’s picture home?” She drew a deep breath, and pools of tears came into her eyes and hung on her lashes. When they spilled down her cheeks, the life came back into me and I got my arms around her at last.

I wondered how I could ever have thought her back was hard and flat. She was softer against me than Mary Mallinson with all her smell of French perfume and her night rail that could be seen through when wet.

“Now here,” I said, feeling an unpleasant hotness in my own eyes, “I won’t have any of this crying nonsense!” I picked her up in my arms, finding her no more in them than a young lamb, and carried her to a bale of straw, so I could sit down with her and get her fur cap off her head and my fingers into her hair.

After a time she tightened her arm around my throat so I couldn’t breathe. “You’ve got to answer me!” she said, when I took steps to break her hold. “I’ve asked you four times about Cap.” I saw then that Jacataqua had come around in front of us and was watching us with interest.

“He’s well,” I said, motioning to Jacataqua to get back to her thatch. “I left him snoring fit to knock the chimney off the inn, and Natanis and Hobomok with him.”

She held me off again with an arm as rigid as a steel band. “For God’s sake!” I said, in a rage, “will you stop pushing me away from you when I’ve wasted God knows how many years; or don’t you want to be kissed?”

“I don’t mind being kissed,” she said. “You can see how I feel about it from this.” She showed me what she meant, and I saw she had spoken the truth. “What I must know,” she went on at length, “is how long a leave have you got from the army?”

“Why,” I said, “I’m traveling express to Cambridge for Colonel Arnold, and Cap and Natanis and Hobomok with me, and we have orders to act as your escort. I have a wedding present for you from Colonel Arnold. We can be married by the priest here at this place unless you think you’ll be everlastingly damned if a papist is mixed up in it. We ought to be at it, what’s more, for we must buy snow-shoes, and I’d like to be across the river by noon.”

“Well,” she said, “I don’t mind the papist, but I don’t see how I can be married without proper clothes.”

“Proper clothes! Since when did you begin thinking of them?”

“Why,” she said, eyeing me reproachfully, “you told me once that breeches were no fit garb for a woman. Since I love you dearly, I must please you by wading through the snow in long skirts.”

“Phoebe,” I asked, “shall we be married now?”

“I’ll die if we aren’t!” she whispered, and then fell silent.

“Steven,” she said, after a little, “when the guns pounded and the wind screamed at the windows and the men began to come back, staggering and falling down and dragging each other, and leaving blots of red in the snow—I watched for you—and watched for you. I saw Colonel Arnold carried past, and Matthias Ogden with the shoulder of his coat a smear of blood. The butcher from York came by with poor Nathaniel Lord across his shoulders like a sheep, a bullet through his lungs. When I ran to Nathaniel to see what word I could take to his people, he choked and died.

“There were none of the others, Steven! Noah and Jethro and Ivory and the rest of them didn’t come back—nobody! Morgan and Steele and Topham and Thayer and Goodrich and Dearborn and Bigelow and Greene and Meigs and all the rest—they none of them came back: none of them! I was afraid you—afraid you wouldn’t come either!”

She clung to me. After a time I told her that most of them had been captured and would come safe home at last. Then there was a bellowing and hallooing below us, and I knew Cap had come hunting for his picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry.

“Steven,” said Phoebe, while the ladder was rattling at the trapdoor, “you found Mary—”

“Yes, we found her.”

Phoebe said no more, but lay against me, stroking my shoulder. It seemed to me I had never known, before this moment, what it was to be at peace.

There was a roar from the trapdoor, and we looked up to see Cap’s face, mouth and eyes wide open, shining at us over the door’s edge like a pumpkin in the light of a harvest moon.

“So it’s you?” I asked him. “What do you want?”

Cap stared. “What do I want? My God, what do you
think
I want? Where’s my picture!”

Phoebe pointed, and his whole face brightened as his eye fell upon the rolled engraving of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry. He pounced on it with a delighted bellow.

When he had unrolled it and studied it for a time, he sat himself down on his heels and looked at us with the air of one who has made a great resolve. “I’m no fool,” he said. “I can see the two of you are thinking of entering the holy bonds of matrimony.”

“I don’t know what makes you think such a thing,” I said, “but it happens you’re right.”

Cap stood looking at us, then at the picture he held in his hands, and then back at us. He swallowed painfully. “I’ll do it!” he said, his voice trembling a little. “I’ve got to make you a wedding present, of course, and it ought to be a good one. I’ll give you my picture of Philadelphia as Seen from Cooper’s Ferry!”

The distress in his face was all too plain, and evidence of what a sacrifice his generosity was forcing him to make; and I told him immediately we couldn’t accept. “It’s too fine and valuable a picture,” I said, “for the simple house we plan to live in.”

“Damn it!” he roared, “why don’t you give Phoebe a say in it! She’s the one that’s going to have the say, anyhow.”

“Nay,” said Phoebe hastily, “we can’t take the picture, Cap. We’ll be living on a ship much of the time. If we took it with us on a ship it would soon become stained and moldy.”

“Well,” Cap sighed, and it was pleasant to see how he wiped his forehead in relief, “if you won’t, you won’t; but if I ever find a copy of it you’ve got to take it. Here: I’ve got some other things with me. Maybe there’s one or two of ’em you could use.”

He emptied the pockets of his breeches and his coat, pouring out silver shoe buckles, gold spoons, pieces of lace, a gold watch with a jeweled fob, two miniatures on ivory, a small gold box, a silver-backed hairbrush, four gold scent bottles, a heap of gold coin, a bag of soft yellow leather, a set of razors with silver handles, pieces of scented soap, and several small objects, such as rings and buckles and seals.

“Now here,” Cap said, dragging something from the depths of his breeches pocket, “here’s something Phoebe might use.” He opened his clumsy fingers to disclose a band of jewels that seemed, in that dim attic, to be filled with blue and red fires.

“Those are diamonds,” he said, “and this contraption is for a woman to wear, like in one of those miniatures.”

Phoebe sat erect on my knee, took it from him, and snapped it around her forehead, so that it bound her tousled hair. She sat there with her hands in her lap, a half-smile on her lips, as though she held some secret from us that we would never learn. Jacataqua came from her delving in the thatch and leaned against Cap’s shoulder, and the two of them stared at her in silence. As for me, I wondered how, if I had lacked the wit to see she was beautiful, I could have had the brain to eat and sleep and go about my business.

She shook her head at length, and took the thing off, turning it in her hand so that fiery glints flashed from it. “I can’t wear this. It must be worth a fortune. Take it back.”

Cap waved his hand airily. “Keep it. If you can’t wear it, sell it or trade it.” Phoebe dropped the band of jewels at his feet, and he picked it up and polished it on the front of his blanket coat. “Well—” he said. “Well—” He wriggled his hand into the yellow leather pouch and took out a string of round white beads, soft and velvety looking.

“Here’s something you
can
wear.”

“Mary’s!” she said.

“What do you care?”

Phoebe looked quickly at me, and I saw what I had never noticed before: that there were flecks of gold in her eyes. She turned back to Cap and shook her head gently. “No,” she said.

Cap hefted the string, as if pondering what to do with it. Jacataqua slipped under his arm and hung there, wedged against him, as she had wedged herself against me many months before and so aroused Phoebe’s ire. Cap closed his thick fingers over the pearls and tightened his arm around Jacataqua until she squeaked a little, though not distressfully.

“Well, now,” he said, frowning at her severely, “I might have knowed this would happen. If I’d got me some pearls long ago, maybe you wouldn’t gone running off after other folks like Burr or George Merchant.”