HENRY
June 14, 1777
HE HAD FORBIDDEN Dottie to accompany him. He wasn’t sure what he might find. In the event, though, he was surprised. The address to which he had been directed was in a modest street in Germantown, but the house was commodious and well kept, though not large.
He knocked at the door and was greeted by a pleasant-faced young African woman in neat calico, whose eyes widened at sight of him. He had thought best not to wear his uniform, though there were men in British uniform here and there in the streets—paroled prisoners, perhaps, or soldiers bearing official communications. Instead, he had put on a good suit of bottle-green, with his best waistcoat, this being gold China silk, embroidered with a number of fanciful butterflies. He smiled, and the woman smiled in turn and put a hand over her mouth to hide it.
“May I help you, sir?”
“Is your master at home?”
She laughed. Softly, and with real amusement.
“Bless you, sir, I have no master. The house is mine.”
He blinked, disconcerted.
“Perhaps I have been misdirected. I am in search of a British soldier, Captain Viscount Asher—Henry Grey is his name. A British prisoner of war?”
She lowered her hand and stared at him, eyes wide. Then her smile returned, broad enough to show two gold-stuffed teeth at the back.
“Henry! Well, why didn’t you say so, sir? Come in, come in!”
And before he could put down his stick, he was whisked inside, up a narrow staircase, and into a neat small bedroom, where he discovered his nephew Henry, sprawled on his back and naked from the waist up, with a small, beaky-looking man in black poking at his belly—this crisscrossed with a number of violent-looking scars.
“I beg your pardon?” He peered over the beaky man’s shoulder and waved gingerly. “How do you do, Henry?”
Henry, whose eyes had been fastened on the ceiling in a tense sort of way, glanced at him, away, back, then sat up abruptly, this movement resulting in an exclamation of protest from the little beaky person and a cry of pain from Henry.
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God.” Henry doubled over, arms clutching his belly and his face clenched in pain. Grey seized him by the shoulders, seeking to ease him back.
“Henry, my dear. Do forgive me. I didn’t mean—”
“And who are you, sir?” the beaky man cried angrily, springing to his feet and facing Grey with clenched fists.
“I am his uncle,” Grey informed him shortly. “Who are you, sir? A doctor?”
The little man drew himself up with dignity.
“Why, no, sir. I am a dowser. Joseph Hunnicutt, sir, professional dowser.”
Henry was still bent double, gasping, but seemed to be getting a little of his breath back. Grey touched his bare back gently. The flesh was warm, a little sweaty, but didn’t seem fevered.
“I am sorry, Henry,” he said. “Will you survive, do you think?”
Henry, to his credit, managed a breathless grunt of laughter.
“It’ll do,” he got out. “Just… it takes… a minute.”
The pleasant-faced black woman was hovering at the door, a sharp eye on Grey.
“This man says he’s your uncle, Henry. Is that so?”
Henry nodded, panting a little. “Lord John … Grey. May I pre … sent Mrs. Mercy Wood… cock?”
Grey bowed punctiliously, feeling slightly ridiculous.
“Your servant, madam. And yours, Mr. Hunnicutt,” he added politely, bowing again.
“Might I ask,” he said, straightening up, “why there is a dowser poking you in the abdomen, Henry?”
“Why, to find the bit o’ metal what’s a-troubling the poor young man, o’ course,” said Mr. Hunnicutt, looking up his long nose—for he was shorter than Grey by several inches.
“I called for him, sir—your lordship, I mean.” Mrs. Woodcock had come into the room by this time, and was looking at him with a faint air of apology. “It’s only that the surgeons hadn’t any luck, and I was so afraid that they’d kill him next time.”
Henry had by now managed to unbend. Grey eased him slowly back until he lay against the pillow, pale and sweating.
“I couldn’t bear it again,” he said, closing his eyes briefly. “I can’t.”
With Henry’s stomach exposed to view and an opportunity to examine it at leisure, Grey could see the puckered scars of two bullet wounds and the longer, clean-edged scars made by a surgeon digging for metal. Three of them. Grey had five such scars himself, crisscrossing the left side of his chest, and he touched his nephew’s hand in sympathy.
“Is it truly necessary to remove the ball—or balls?” he asked, looking up at Mrs. Woodcock. “If he has survived so far, perhaps the ball is lodged in a place where—”
But Mrs. Woodcock shook her head decidedly.
“He can’t eat,” she said bluntly. “He can’t swallow a thing but soup, and none so much of that. He wasn’t but skin and bones when they brought him to me,” she said, gesturing at Henry. “And you can see, he’s not that much more now.”
He wasn’t. Henry took after his mother rather than Hal, being normally ruddy-cheeked and of a rather stocky build. There was no evidence of either trait at the moment; every rib showed plain, his belly was so sunken that the points of his hip bones poked up sharp through the linen sheet, and his face was approximately the same hue as said sheet, bar deep violet circles under the eyes.
“I see,” Grey said slowly. He glanced at Mr. Hunnicutt. “Have you managed to locate anything?”
“Well, I have,” the dowser said, and, leaning over Henry’s body, laid a long, thin finger gently on the young man’s belly. “One, at least. T’other, I’m not so sure of, just yet.”
“I told you, Mercy, it’s no good.” Henry’s eyes were still closed, but his hand rose a little and Mrs. Woodcock took it, with a naturalness that made Grey blink. “Even if he was sure—I can’t do it again. I’d rather die.” Weak as he was, he spoke with an absolute conviction, and Grey recognized the family stubbornness.
Mrs. Woodcock’s pretty face was creased in a worried frown. She seemed to feel Grey’s eyes upon her, for she looked briefly up at him. He didn’t change expression, and she lifted her chin a little, meeting his eyes with something not far from fierceness, still holding Henry’s hand.
Oh, like that, is it? Grey thought. Well, well.
He coughed, and Henry opened his eyes.
“Be that as it may, Henry,” he said, “you will oblige me by not dying before I can bring your sister to bid you farewell.”
RESERVATIONS
July 1, 1777
THE INDIANS WORRIED him. General Burgoyne found them enchanting. But General Burgoyne wrote plays.
It is not, William wrote slowly in the letter to his father that he was composing, struggling to find form in words for his reservations, that I think him a fantasist or suspect that he does not appreciate the essential nature of the Indians he deals with. He appreciates it very much. But I remember talking with Mr. Garrick once in London, and his reference to the playwright as a little god who directs the actions of his creations, exerting absolute control upon them. Mrs. Cowley argued with this, saying that it is delusion to assume that the creator controls his creations and that an attempt to exert such control while ignoring the true nature of those creations is doomed to failure.
He stopped, biting his quill, feeling that he had come close to the heart of the matter but perhaps not quite reached it.
I think General Burgoyne does not quite apprehend the independence of mind and purpose that… No, that wasn’t quite it. He drew a line through the sentence and dipped his quill for a fresh try. He turned a phrase over in his mind, rejected it, did the same with another, and at last abandoned the search for eloquence in favor of a simple unburdening of his mind. It was late, he’d walked nearly twenty miles in the course of the day, and he was sleepy.
He believes he can use the Indians as a tool, and I think he is wrong. He stared at the sentence for a bit, shook his head at its bluntness, but could think of nothing better and could waste no more time on the effort; the stub of his candle had almost burned out. Comforting himself with the idea that, after all, his father knew Indians—and probably General Burgoyne—much better than he did, he briskly signed, sanded, blotted, and sealed the letter, then fell into his bed and a dreamless sleep.
The sense of uneasiness regarding the Indians remained with him, though. He had no dislike of Indians; in fact, he enjoyed their company, and hunted now and again with some of them, or shared a companionable evening drinking beer and telling stories round their fires.
“The thing is,” he said to Balcarres one evening, as they walked back from a particularly bibulous dinner that the general had held for his staff officers, “they don’t read the Bible.”
“Who don’t? Hold up.” Major Alexander Lindsay, Sixth Earl of Balcarres, put out a hand to ward off a passing tree and, clutching it one-handed to keep his balance, groped for his flies.
“Indians.”
It was dark, but Sandy turned his head and William could just about see one eye shut slowly in the effort to fix the other on him. There had been a great deal of wine with dinner, and a number of ladies present, which added to the conviviality.
Balcarres concentrated on his pissing, then exhaled with relief and closed both eyes.
“No,” he said. “They mostly don’t.” He seemed content to leave the matter there, but it had occurred to William—himself a little less organized in thought than usual—that perhaps he had failed to express himself completely.
“I mean,” he said, swaying just a little as a gust of wind boomed down through the trees, “the centurion. You know, he says go and the fellow goeth. You tell an Indian go and maybe he goeth and maybe he damned well goeth not, depending how the prospect strikes him.”
Balcarres was now concentrating on the effort of doing up his flies and didn’t answer.
“I mean,” William amplified, “they don’t take orders.”
“Oh. No. They don’t.”
“You give your Indians orders, though?” He’d meant to make it a statement, but it didn’t quite come out that way. Balcarres led a regiment of light infantry but also kept a large group of rangers, many of them Indians; he not infrequently dressed like one himself.
“But then, you’re a Scot.”
Balcarres had succeeded in doing up his flies and now stood in the center of the path, squinting at William.
“You’re drunk, Willie.” This was said with no tone of accusation; more with the pleased sense of one who has made a useful deduction.
“Yes. But I’ll be sober in the morning and you’ll still be a Scot.” This struck them both as hilarious and they staggered some distance together, repeating the jest at intervals and bumping into each other. By simple chance, they stumbled upon William’s tent first, and he invited Balcarres to join him in a glass of negus before bed.
“Sett … les the stomach,” he said, narrowly avoiding falling headfirst into his campaign chest as he groped for cups and bottles. “Makes you sleep better.”
Balcarres had succeeded in lighting the candle and sat holding it, blinking owl-eyed in its glow. He sipped the negus William handed to him carefully, eyes closed as though to savor it, then suddenly opened them.
“What’s being a Scot have to do with reading the Bible?” he demanded, this remark having evidently returned suddenly to his cognizance. “You calling me a heathen? My grandmother’s Scots and she reads the Bible all the time. I’ve read it myself. Bits of it,” he added, and gulped the rest of his glass.
William frowned, trying to remember what on earth …
“Oh,” he said. “Not the Bible. Indians. Stubborn buggers. Don’t goeth. Scots don’t goeth either when you tell them, or not all the time. I thought maybe that was why. Why they listen to you,” he added as an afterthought. “Your Indians.”
Balcarres thought that funny, too, but when he had at length stopped laughing, he shook his head slowly to and fro.
“It’s … you know a horse?”
“I know a lot of horses. Which one?”
Balcarres spit a small quantity of negus down his chin, but wiped it away.
“A horse,” he repeated, drying his hand on his breeches. “You can’t make a horse do anything. You see what he’s going to do and then you tell him to do that, and he thinks it’s your idea, so next time you tell him something, he’s more likely to do what you tell him.”
“Oh.” William considered this carefully. “Yes.” They drank for a bit in silence, mulling over this profundity. At last Balcarres looked up from a long contemplation of his glass.
“Who do you think has better tits?” he asked seriously. “Mrs. Lind or the baroness?”