So far, Dr. Otto hadn’t lost a single patient through inoculation, though men were dying in the hospital from smallpox they’d caught in the camps.
By the end of February, Marcus had been promoted from performing menial tasks on the wards at night to undertaking inoculations on his own. It was evening at the end of a long day, and Marcus had only one more soldier to see to before he could leave the hospital for a few hours of sleep.
“What’s your name?” Marcus asked the newest man on the ward as he sat down at his bedside. He was about Marcus’s age, smooth of face and wary in his expressions.
“Silas Hubbard,” he replied.
Marcus drew out a small knife and tin box. The soldier looked at them with barely controlled fear.
“Where you from, Silas?”
“Here and there. Connecticut. Mostly,” Hubbard confessed. “You?”
“New York. Mostly.” Marcus lifted the tin lid. Inside the box were whorls of thread, all of them dampened with fluid from the sores of inoculated smallpox patients.
“Is this going to kill me, Doc?” Hubbard asked.
“Probably not,” Marcus said. He showed Hubbard the scar on his left arm. “What I’m about to do to you, someone else did to me last summer. And here I am, freezing to death in Washington’s army not six months later.”
Hubbard gave Marcus a tentative smile.
“Give me your arm. I’ll give you a small case of smallpox in return. That way you can survive the winter and get a fierce case of the itch come spring,” Marcus said, employing soldiers’ humor to lighten the atmosphere.
“And what are you going to do for me when I’m tormented with itching?” Hubbard asked.
“Nothing,” Marcus said with a grin. “Unless Washington orders me to scratch it for you.”
“I saw Washington. At Princeton.” Hubbard settled back against the pillows and closed his eyes. He held his arm out obediently while Marcus examined it for a good place to make the shallow incisions.
Marcus found a spot between two old scars that were puckered and twisted. He wondered how—or from whom—Hubbard had received them.
“I wish he was my pa,” Silas said, his voice wistful. “They say he’s as fair as he is brave.”
“That’s what I hear, too,” Marcus said, drawing the lancet through Hubbard’s flesh. The boy didn’t even wince. “God didn’t give the general sons of his own. I reckon that’s why He gave Washington an army—so that he could be father to us all.”
A draft brushed across Marcus’s shoulders. He turned, expecting to see the surgeon’s mate who was replacing him on the wards.
Instead, he saw something that made his hackles rise.
A tall man in the deerskin hunting shirt and leggings of a Virginia rifleman was stalking silently through the beds. His feet made no sound, though Marcus knew the springy floorboards creaked under the slightest pressure. There was something in the way he carried himself that was familiar, and Marcus searched through his memories, trying to place him.
Then Marcus remembered where he’d seen that wolfish face before.
It was the dead New Hampshire rifleman from Bunker Hill. Except this man was alive. And dressed like he came from Virginia, not New England.
Their eyes met.
“Well, well. I know you.” The man cocked his head slightly. “You stole my rifle. At Bunker Hill.”
“Cole?” Marcus whispered. He blinked.
The man was gone.
The Pennsylvania Packet August 26, 1777
page 3
SIXTEEN DOLLARS REWARD.
WAS STOLEN out of the pasture of the subscriber, in North Milford Hundred, Cecil County, Maryland, on the night of the 3d of July last, a light dun Mare, about fourteen hands high, black mane and tail, a natural trotter, newly shod, has a small ace on her forehead, and a remarkable white piece of hair above her foretop which extends across to the root of her ears. Whoever takes up the mare and thief, so that the owner may have his mare and the thief be brought to justice, shall have the above Reward, and for the mare only, EIGHT DOLLARS paid by
PETER BAULDEN
TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD.
DESERTED last night from Capt. Roland Maddison’s company, the 12th Virginia regiment, commanded by Col. James Wood, in General Scott’s brigade, JOSEPH COMTON, eighteen or nineteen years of age, five feet eight inches high, brown complexion; and WILLIAM BASSETT, of the same age, five feet six inches high, fair complexion, has two of his foreteeth. They carried with them a blanket and other clothing usual for soldiers to wear, and a quantity of cartridges. Whoever takes up said Deserters and takes them to camp at Head Quarters, or secures them in any of the States gaols and gives information thereof, shall have the above Reward and all reasonable expences, or TEN DOLLARS for each.
Rowland Maddison, Captain Freehold, Monmouth County, New Jersey, Aug. 11
TEN DOLLARS REWARD.
DESERTED from Capt. John Burrowe’s company, in Col. David Forman’s regiment of Continental troops, on the 6th of July last, a certain GEORGE SHADE, about twenty-four years of age, five feet eight inches high, has light coloured hair and blue eyes, one of his legs thicker than the other occasioned by it being broke. It is supposed he is on one of the vessels of war in the Delaware river. Whoever will apprehend the said deserter and secure him, so that he might be had again, shall receive the above Reward and all reasonable charges.
JOHN BURROWES, Captain
16
Lame
AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1777
Gerty’s tavern was quiet now that the merchants had finished their midday trading, and the men had not yet come off the Philadelphia docks at the end of work to share a drink with friends. It was sweltering at the busy intersection of Spruce and Front Streets, the strong sun casting shadows of the masts of the ships at the wharves. The temperatures would not peak until three o’clock. By then, Marcus suspected Gerty would be able to fry bacon on her doorstep, and the city would be uninhabitable due to the stench coming from the tanneries and the filth in the streets.
He sat in the corner by the open, deeply casemented window next to the articulated skeleton of a man that Gerty had won from the medical students in a game of cards. It had been propped up in the front room ever since, festooned with broadsides and notices tied to his ribs, a pipe clamped between his teeth, clutching used tickets to the anatomy lectures in his bony fingers.
Marcus was reading the Pennsylvania Packet. It had become a part of his routine to thumb through the papers Gerty kept on hand and scour them for news from Massachusetts. At first, he had done so out of fear, looking for mention of Obadiah’s murder. But nearly a year had passed and there was still no accusation against a blond young man answering to the name of MacNeil. Now he did so out of a more nostalgic hunger for news of home. But there was little of it. These days the papers were filled with rewards for anyone who would turn in an army deserter or return a lost or stolen horse, and news of the latest British maneuvers off the coast.
“Afternoon, Doc.” Vanderslice plopped himself on the bench opposite and stacked his feet on the windowsill. “What’s going on in the world?”
“Everyone’s running away,” Marcus said, scanning the columns of print.
“I’d run from this heat if I could.” Vanderslice mopped his forehead with the tail of his coarsely woven shirt. Even for Philadelphia, it had been a prodigiously warm summer. “Why hasn’t Dr. Franklin invented a way to stop it? I hear he can devise a way around anything.”
“Franklin’s still in Paris, probably eating iced berries from a spoon,” Marcus replied. “I don’t think he has any time to worry about us, Vanderslice.”
“Iced berries. I feel cooler just thinking about them.” Vanderslice plucked a card from the skeleton’s hand and fanned himself. “And that spoon is probably held by a fine French lady.”
A blowsy woman of indeterminate age with pockmarked skin and orange hair that defied nature came to the table. Her dress was parrot green, stained with wine, and strained over her bosom.