Hamilton's Battalion Page 11

  He sighed. “I may live to regret this, but then again, I may not. We may all be dead tomorrow. You understand that?”

  “Yes.” She bit her tongue to keep from adding “keynehore” to ward off the evil eye.

  He nodded. “God willing, we will both live to see our new country’s laws written, and scrawl in our corrections and additions. Your people’s fate holds a peculiar interest for me.” The corner of his mouth curled up. “Did you know I was taught by a Jewess when I was very small? I could say the Decalogue in Hebrew, once.”

  “What’s the Decalogue?” Nathan interrupted, looking up from the notes he was taking for Mrs. Hamilton.

  “That’s what I said.”

  Dubiously, he eyed what he’d just written. “And how do you spell it?”

  Rachel shrugged.

  “What did he mean by ‘a peculiar interest’?”

  “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “It might just mean he was one of those goyim who natter on about the glory of the Chosen People or believe Christ will come again if they convert us. But I thought—I imagined, maybe—that he looked at me with special meaning when he said it. For a moment I wondered—well, he said he learned Hebrew as a boy, didn’t he?”

  “You wondered if he might be Jewish.”

  She nodded. “Why not? The Caribbean is full of secret Jews. But I certainly don’t intend to suggest any such thing to his wife.”

  Rachel’s heart jittered in her throat. Was this really the time for reminiscences? “The what?”

  Hamilton laughed. “The Ten Commandments.” His brow furrowed. “Anochi Adonai Elohecha…”

  With a pang of remorse, she remembered Zvi’s words on Simchas Torah. Don’t kill. Here she was, fighting tooth and nail to do just that.

  “It’s no use. It’s gone now.” Genuine sadness passed across his face. “I was so small she stood me on a table to teach me.”

  “Gam zeh ya’avor, my mother always said. Everything passes, and so will this.” What would Mrs. Jacobs say now? Go home to Nathan, probably.

  I’m trying, Mamma, she thought, and then caught herself. She hadn’t made up her mind yet. Had she?

  Hamilton seemed to think that over for an eternity. His eyes, she noticed, were nearly purple, their lashes long and thick. “Maybe,” he said. “Sometimes I think so. But we had better act as if what we do here will last.”

  Rachel’s heart thumped and steadied. Yes. That was right.

  “Very well,” he said. “If your husband permits it, I suppose I have no prerogative to overrule him. You win, Corporal. Let’s talk to your messmates.”

  Her friends were waiting by their tent in an anxious clump. Rachel refused to feel sorry for them.

  Colonel Hamilton gave her a brisk shove towards them. “You can rest easy, soldiers. Your friend appears normal in every respect.” He grinned. “Well, perhaps an inch or two past normal. Now let’s consider the matter settled.”

  Zvi looked relieved, Tench mortified, and Scipio suspicious. No one spoke.

  Hamilton raised his eyebrows. “Is the matter settled, gentlemen?” His tone indicated that “No” was not an acceptable answer.

  Rachel felt a sharp burst of gratitude. Every soldier had learned there was nothing officers hated more than being called liars. If they did it to each other, it meant a duel. The colonel had thrown his full weight behind her, simply out of a sense of fair play, and maybe kindness.

  A chorus of “yes, sir”s.

  “Good, because I have more important business to attend to—and if I hear you’ve been wasting time and embarrassing us all by spreading this sordid anecdote, you will regret it bitterly. I’ll see you and your men at five o’clock.”

  And he strode off. Rachel tried to decide if it was possible to be in love with two men at once.

  She looked her friends coldly in the face. They didn’t meet her eyes. “Let’s get back to work,” she said shortly. “I never want to hear about this again.”

  And that, somehow, broke the tension. “Oh, please,” Scipio said. “I’ll be telling this story to my grandchildren. It’s side-splitting.”

  Tench laughed. “Had he ever seen a circumcised one before?”

  Zvi rolled his eyes, visibly begging her not to be angry, to “oy der goyim” with him like always. “Sorry. I didn’t want to say anything in the first place.”

  She couldn’t forget what they’d done, but there was no point in holding a grudge—not when they might all be dead tomorrow. And it would be an exciting episode in her memoirs someday.

  Suddenly, she had to stifle an exhilarated laugh—she’d gotten out of it! “You’re all awful and I hate you,” she said. “Just because I’m short! And no, he’d never seen a circumcised one before. He asked me questions.”

  Her comrades had only wanted to protect her. She believed that. But Nathan wanted to protect her, too, and he hadn’t tried to stop her.

  She had actually been hurt by that. Doesn’t he believe we owe each other anything? Doesn’t he think of himself as my husband anymore? Colonel Hamilton had said it without thinking—if your husband permits it. Everyone—even Rachel, deep down, a little—believed it was Nathan’s place to make this decision for her. Everyone but Nathan.

  Who had offered her a get, too, if she wanted one.

  The nervous laughter bubbling in her throat changed, nearly became a sob. She didn’t want a get. She wanted Nathan. She wanted to share a home with him again. She wanted to be the mother of his children.

  Men would think she was even funnier when she was a mother. Oh, see how she worries and nags. See how she thinks her children are clever and handsome. What a fool. Never mind that she’d stormed Yorktown.

  She couldn’t dither about this now. She was a soldier, and she had work to do.

  The blood seeped through Nathan’s fingers and dripped onto the floor. “Do you think I could get a bandage or something first?”

  “Steady on, Mr. Mendelson. We’ll tend to your arm very soon. Can you show me on this map what you mean?”

  “Do I look like I have a sense of direction to you? Harlem is north and the Battery is south. They said across the river.” He pointed with his elbow to where he thought the river was, spattering more blood on the floor. “So…that way? And the fusilier something. Redoubt. What is a fusilier?”

  Rachel lay on the cold ground just before the first parallel. Around her lay her battalion; only Gimat’s battalion and the pioneers with their axes were before them. The rest of the Light Division made up the supporting column behind.

  All week, the trenches had meant danger and exposure. Until the time came to climb out and lie in the open ground between them and the British redoubts, she hadn’t realized how much protection they actually gave. Now there was nothing at all shielding her from the British guns, except British ignorance of their position.

  All the cannon in the trenches were silent, so the signal would be clear: three mortar shells from the French grand battery coming quick, one after the other. She glanced west and nearly leapt up, ready for the march—

  But the two brilliants spots in the air weren’t tumbling like shells. They hung, too bright and big to be stars. The planets Jupiter and Venus meeting, Scipio had told her. Rachel blinked, half expecting them to fade when she opened her eyes.

  George Washington himself had spoken to them before they marched out of the trenches. Rachel couldn’t remember what he’d said. Her mind was a jumble. What was the watchword? For a moment, panicked, she couldn’t call it to mind.

  No, no, it was “Rochambeau”; she remembered because everyone had agreed it was good for a charge, because it sounded like Rush on, boys! if you said it fast enough.

  Distantly, guns began to blaze: the diversions at the other end of the town and across the river.

  She went over her battalion’s orders: at the signal, creep a quarter mile forward to the right-hand redoubt, while the French crept to the left-hand one. Fixed bayonets only, to avoid a misfire alerting the enemy.
Break off when the head of the column reached the abatis—the wooden spikes and mass of sharpened branches circling the earthworks—and come up quick on Gimat’s left to extend the front line.

  Unloaded muskets were a clever strategy that had been used before with success. Rachel still felt strange and naked going into battle with her weapon unloaded. She put out a hand and laid it on her musket—a curiously intimate gesture. Just so, home in bed, she might have reached out for Nathan’s hand.

  She had learned to use this musket at Valley Forge, Baron Steuben teaching them to load and fire as one without breaking formation. She’d practiced until she couldn’t lift her sore arms, until she could do it perfectly. So they would have no reason to doubt her, to send her away. After her promotion, she had taught her men to do it.

  She had earned her place. She had labored and fought to be here. She had drilled her squad in bayonet charges, and she could get them through this.

  She would get them through this, and they would take the redoubt. Men from the Pennsylvania Line would march in with shovels to link the British earthworks to the Allied second parallel, bringing the whole besieged town into the line of fire. Horses would drag the last waiting, eager cannon from the artillery park, and Yorktown would be razed from the face of the earth like Jericho.

  Nathan was in Yorktown.

  Her hand crept instinctively to her chest. Nathan’s ring under her clothes was so small her fingers could barely make it out, but it dug into her breastbone when she pressed.

  She still didn’t know what she’d tell him if she survived the night. But if she died…

  If she died, she wanted Nathan to believe she would have said yes. She wanted him to have that much comfort, at least.

  Rachel tugged the strip of velvet out of her collar, looping the tip of her index finger through the ring. When the old ribbon ripped, she’d been so afraid to dig through her clothes in the presence of her comrades that she’d almost let it be lost. She was glad now she hadn’t.

  After half a year’s use, the knot was too tight to untie and the fabric too new to tear. Feeling for her knife, she sliced the ribbon clean through and dropped the ring into her hand. A warm circle in her cold palm.

  She closed her fist tightly, squeezing her eyes shut. When she opened them, there shone Jupiter and Venus, that had stood sentry in the sky for thousands of years before men learned to make mortar shells, and would guard the Earth still when all the swords had been beaten into plowshares.

  She remembered Nathan translating the evening prayer service for her in their warm bed: You assign the stars to their watches…

  Kaddish, that in Hebrew sounded so solemn and spoke so eloquently of longing and adoration and grief, was just may His name be glorified and embellished and covered in gold leaf with little flourishes drawn round it, &c., &c. But she’d liked the one about the stars.

  The ring stuck at the second knuckle when she tried to slip it on her finger.

  Panic seized her. Her hands had changed. It didn’t fit anymore. She had changed and she couldn’t go back. She’d thought back then that standing watch sounded fine and noble, and now she’d done it herself in the snow, thoughts full of nothing but hot johnnycakes and hoping they wouldn’t find her frozen corpse in the morning—

  But she twisted and pushed, and the ring scraped over her knuckle and settled comfortably at the base of her finger.

  She let out a breath. Mrs. Nathan Mendelson.

  She smothered a laugh. No. She was Corporal Mrs. Mendelson now.

  No one would ever call her that, but she liked how it sounded.

  The signal came at last: a boom and an arcing shell from the French grand battery, then a second and a third.

  Halfway to the redoubt, they were halted.

  “They’ll need a volunteer from each company for the forlorn hope,” the lieutenant whispered to their platoon. He stepped out of the column to confer with the officers.

  The forlorn hope! Rachel had been so distracted she’d forgotten. Composed of volunteers from the column, they would lead the assault and be first into the redoubt, earning the largest share of casualties and glory. Should she volunteer?

  Isaac Carvalho was before her, elbowing past and pushing his way to the cluster of officers. She couldn’t hear their low-voiced conversation or make out their faces, but she saw Carvalho march away, to the front of the column. Was this her last sight of him alive?

  She thought of the knapsacks they had piled neatly in the trench. How many would go uncollected on their return?

  The moon was a sliver. The column crept forward in the dark. Rachel couldn’t tell how far they had gone, or where the front line was. She saw the burst of light before she heard the long cracks of cannons and the short pops of musketry: the enemy in the redoubt firing with everything they had.

  Up ahead, the American column broke out in cheers. “Now,” the order came. “Now!” Their battalion split off—she was watching her squad to make sure they stayed in formation—and then the column broke apart and they were all racing toward the light and sound of the British guns, determined to get there before the fight was over. The air was filled with screams and huzzahs.

  “The fort’s our own!” men shouted. “Rush on, boys!”

  A whoop broke from Rachel’s throat. Her heart was a drum—finally!—finally after all this waiting it was time.

  Chapter Nine

  The gap their pioneers had cut in the abatis around the fort was blocked up with men. Soldiers simply swarmed over and through the bristling wooden teeth. Rachel wormed her way between two sharp stakes and scrambled up onto the earthwork. She tried to turn to see if any of her squad needed a hand over—but already someone shoved at her, trying to get past.

  The light of the British guns was fainter now; the men were fighting hand to hand inside the redoubt. The Americans must be winning—how could the enemy withstand this flood of men? It would all be over before she could get inside.

  Rushing forward through the trench littered with little crackling hand grenades, Rachel passed two soldiers trading musket blows. Was that a British officer? Why had he left the safety of the redoubt?

  “Have you read anything lately?” the redcoat shouted. No, she must have misheard. She would never know what he had really said; they were behind her and gone. Scrambling over another row of sharpened tree trunks, she stepped on something that moaned—a man, she realized—and kept going, up the breastwork and into the fort at last.

  It was dark inside, lit only by gunpowder and a couple of dark lanterns. That was enough to make out the British soldiers’ neat red coats, all identical, all in good repair. Rachel jabbed her bayonet into one with a rending of good wool cloth and a sharp spurt of satisfaction.

  As she forced her way through the crowd toward the single British cannon still firing, she caught a glimpse of Captain Olney of the Rhode Island Regiment through the tight protective knot of his men, holding his bowels in with both hands as he shouted an order.

  A British soldier blocked her path. Rachel parried his jab with her musket, pushing the point of her bayonet into his flesh. He wrenched the weapon out of her hands and tossed it to the side.

  Possessive fury leapt in her chest. She wrestled him for his firearm, digging her fingers into the wound she’d made. Blood ran down his arm. He cried out and she didn’t care at all, she was glad, she hated him. Was that wrong?

  “British soldiers, surrender your arms!” a crisp British voice shouted. The cry was taken up by other voices: “Major Campbell’s men, lay down your arms!”

  The soldier she was fighting bared his teeth at her and let go of his musket. Stumbling backwards, Rachel slipped in something wet, landing hard with her hand in a pool of blood. She glanced reflexively at the body beside it and recoiled when she knew its face.

  Isaac Carvalho.

  Oh. Oh, that instinctive drawing back was wrong, was dreadful, she had to help him. She hauled him into her lap to feel for his pulse with cold, bloody fingers.
He was warm, but so were new corpses, she couldn’t find his heartbeat, she couldn’t find it—

  Through the press of still and silent men, she saw Colonel Hamilton ceremoniously receive the British officer’s sword. Fury rushed back, hot and dancing. The prisoner would give his parole now and be sent home to his wife, and Carvalho’s pack would lie in the trench for eternity.

  A captain in buff and blue stepped toward Campbell, bayonet lowered. “Remember Colonel Scammell?” he demanded.

  I remember Scammell, Rachel thought. Kill him. But her fingers trembled on the boy’s neck. What would happen when that bayonet sliced forward? Would the whole fort rise and slaughter the British?

  Voices clamored in her head. Nathan’s: Mobs never bode well for Jews. Hamilton’s: We had better act as if what we do here will last. Her mother’s, repeating the old piece of Jewish wisdom: To save one life is to save the world.

  Her own: The rules we choose to follow make us who we are.

  She stood in a rush, letting Carvalho’s corpse thud to the ground. But Colonel Hamilton had already stepped between Major Campbell and that lowered bayonet.

  “Remember yourself, sir,” he said coldly. “This man has surrendered. Are we to imitate the enemy’s barbarity?”

  Rachel pushed forward, ready to defend him if necessary. On the far side of the redoubt, she caught sight of Elijah Sutton doing the same, but the press of men was too great for even a giant like him to move quickly—

  The captain shouldered his gun with a scowl.

  Her knees gave out. She sat in a heap by Carvalho’s body. “We’ll do it,” she promised him. “I swear to you. We’ll make light in the darkness.”

  The boy stirred, his eyelids fluttering. His lips moved, mumbling something that might have been “Corporal?”

  Rachel staggered, light-headed, to her feet once more, blinking away tears, a hand on the earthen wall to keep from tumbling back down. “Doctor!” she cried out, hoarsely. “Doctor.”

  And like a miracle, a doctor came, there was already a doctor in the fort. Rachel gripped his hand—oh no, she’d gotten blood on him. But his hands were already bloody. It was all right.