“You’re a spy.” Marcus pointed a trembling finger.
“Wrong man, I’m afraid. It’s Matthew who gathers the intelligence. I’m just a soldier. The name is John Russell, Seventeenth Regiment of Light Dragoons. Death and glory boys. Formerly John Cole, First New Hampshire Regiment.” Russell patted the breast of his coat, which gave off a strange crinkling sound like it was full of paper. “Come, Matthew. There’s a war to finish.”
“Go. You’ve got the terms of surrender,” de Clermont said. “I’ll sit with Doc.”
“Why did the brotherhood wait so damn long to do something? We might have been spared this whole summer of campaigning—not to mention saved this boy’s life.”
“Ask my father.” De Clermont sounded as weary as Marcus felt. “Or Baldwin, if you can find him among the jaegers.”
“Oh, well. It’s no matter. If not for war, what would creatures like us do each spring?” Russell asked with a snort.
“I don’t know, John. Plant gardens? Fall in love? Make things?” De Clermont sounded wistful.
“You’re a sentimental old fool, Matthew.” Russell extended his right arm. De Clermont took it, clasping it at the elbow. It was an oddly old-fashioned farewell, one that seemed more appropriate to armored knights and Agincourt than to Yorktown’s battlefield. “Until next time.”
With that, Russell vanished.
* * *
—
MARCUS’S GRASP OF TIME and place loosened further after Russell’s departure. His fevered dreams were filled with odd, sharp fragments of his past, and he found it increasingly difficult to answer the chevalier de Clermont’s questions.
“Is there someone I should write to?” de Clermont asked. “Family? A sweetheart you left back home?”
Marcus shuffled through the ghosts of Hadley who haunted his waking hours: kindly Tom Buckland and his caring wife; Anna Porter, probably married by now; old Ellie Pruitt, probably dead; Joshua Boston, who had enough worldly cares without Marcus adding to them; Zeb Pruitt, his hero, who could barely read. His friends in the Philadelphia Associators had moved on with their own lives. For a moment, Marcus considered writing to Dr. Otto, who had given him a chance at a better life.
“No family,” Marcus said. “No home.”
“Everyone has a family.” De Clermont’s expression was thoughtful. “You are a curious man, Marcus MacNeil. What made you give up your name? When I met you at Brandywine, you were already Doc. And Galen Chauncey is an assumed name if ever I heard one.”
“Am a Chauncey.” Marcus found talking exhausting but would force himself to do so on this important point. “Like my mother.”
“Your mother. I see.” De Clermont sounded as though he understood.
“Tired.” Marcus turned his aching head away.
But the chevalier kept asking him questions. Whenever Marcus’s delirium abated, he answered them.
“What made you become a surgeon?” de Clermont asked him.
“Tom. He fixed me up. Taught me things.” Marcus remembered the lessons in anatomy and doctoring he’d learned in Buckland’s Northampton surgery.
“You should have gone to university, studied medicine properly,” de Clermont said. “You are already a fine physician. I suspect you might have been a great one, given an opportunity.”
“Harvard,” Marcus whispered. “Ma says Chaunceys go to Harvard.”
“Far be it from me to contradict your mother, but these days the best surgeons go to Edinburgh,” de Clermont replied with a smile. “Before they went to Montpellier or Bologna. Before that, it was Salamanca, Alexandria, or Pergamum.”
Marcus sighed, wistful at the prospect of so much knowledge, forever out of reach. “I wish.”
“And if someone could grant you that wish—could give you a second chance at life—would you take him up on the offer?” De Clermont’s face bore a strange, avid expression.
Marcus nodded. His mother would be so pleased if he went to college, even if he didn’t attend Harvard.
“And what if you had to wait a time before you could begin your studies—establish a new name, learn a new language, polish your Latin?” de Clermont asked.
Marcus shrugged. He was dying. Polishing his Latin seemed easy in comparison.
“I see.” De Clermont’s shrewd eyes darkened. “And what if you had to hunt, every day of your life, just to survive?”
“Good hunter,” Marcus replied, proudly thinking of the squirrels, fish, turkeys, and deer he’d shot to keep his family alive. Hell, he’d even gotten a shot off on a wolf once, though they were supposed to be gone and Noah Cook said it was just a mangy old dog.
“Marcus? Did you hear me?” De Clermont’s face was very close, and his eyes reminded Marcus of that gray and grizzled animal who yelped and ran away, never to be seen again. “You don’t have much time to decide.”
In his bones, Marcus felt he had all the time in the world.
“Pay attention, Marcus. I asked if you would be willing to kill someone for this chance to live a doctor’s life. Not an animal—a man.” De Clermont’s voice held a note of urgency that cut through Marcus’s fever and the fog of disorientation and pain that accompanied it.
“Yes—if he deserved it,” Marcus said.
* * *
—
MARCUS SLEPT FOR A WHILE after that. When he woke, the chevalier de Clermont was in the midst of a story that was more fantastic than Marcus’s own dreams. He said he had lived for more than a thousand years. That he had been a carpenter and a mason, a soldier and a spy, a poet, a doctor, a lawyer.
De Clermont spoke of some of the men he had killed. Someone in Jerusalem, and others in France and Germany and Italy. And he mentioned a woman, too, someone named Eleanor.
There were frightening parts to the story, elements that made Marcus think he was indeed in hell. The chevalier talked about his taste for blood, and how he drank from living creatures and tried not to kill them. Surely such a thing was impossible.
“Would you drink from a man’s veins to survive?” Even in the midst of his story, the chevalier de Clermont kept asking questions.
Marcus was burning up with fever, his mind addled with the heat and the pressure in his veins.
“If I did, would the pain stop?” Marcus asked.
“Yes,” de Clermont replied.
“Then I would,” Marcus confessed.
* * *
—
MARCUS DREAMED HE WAS FLYING, high and fast above the hospital. The floor below was stained with vomit and worse, and mice foraged for scraps to eat.
Then everything turned green as the hospital tent vanished and the filthy floor became grass, and the grass turned to forest. The forest grew deeper, greener. Marcus moved faster and faster. He never climbed higher, but his rapid progress turned the whole world to a blur of green and brown and black. Marcus felt the air, cold against his fevered body. His teeth chattered like the skeleton in Gerty’s front room in Philadelphia.
Day became night, and he was flying on a horse. Someone slapped him. Hard.
“Don’t die.” A man with dark eyes and pale skin stared down at him. “Not yet. You have to be alive when I do this.”
The chevalier de Clermont was in his dream now, and so was Russell. They were in a sheltered glade, surrounded by trees. With them was a band of Indian warriors who obeyed de Clermont’s orders.
“What are you doing?” Russell asked de Clermont.
“Giving this boy a second chance,” answered de Clermont.
“You have a war to finish!” Russell said.
“Cornwallis won’t be in any rush to agree to the terms of surrender. Besides, I have to collect the mail,” de Clermont said.
Marcus finally understood why the colonial mail service was so expensive and unreliable: It was run by devils and dead men. He laughed at the image of Beelzebub, mounted on a black horse, carrying a sack of post. But the mirth split his head in two like a rotten apple, and his mouth filled with the bitter tang of blood.
Something had hemorrhaged.
“No more.” For Marcus, those three words encapsulated a lifetime of disappointment and broken promises.
“War is a hellishly difficult time to become a wearh, Matthew,” Russell said, worried. “Are you sure?”