Hamilton's Battalion Page 8

  “What time is it?”

  “Nine past.”

  He banged his head on the desk.

  “I’m sure he’s fine.” The sergeant sounded bemused that you could worry so much about one single person in an army. How many friends did Rinckhart have to worry about? How many of them were already dead?

  All through the camp, they were saying this siege could end the war. Nathan hoped with corrosive desperation that they were right, because he couldn’t stand another year of it. No one could. The country couldn’t.

  You could only tear something apart so far before it couldn’t be put back together. New York City was already not much better than a country market town. How many people would come back?

  How many Loyalists still in the city would flee to England if the rebels won?

  “Is he sleeping?” Rachel’s voice said.

  He bolted upright. “No!” Just waiting for you, he managed not to say.

  He couldn’t see any signs of injury, but she looked asleep on her feet. She came and stood by his chair for only a moment before slumping to the ground and leaning her temple against it. “Good morning.”

  It was afternoon, but who cared? “How are you?”

  She gave him the casualty figures for her regiment as if that was an answer. “Could you see the ship burning?”

  “No, I was in the guardhouse. But I heard all about it.”

  She sighed. “It was pretty.”

  “New York was pretty when it burned too.” He could hear the bitterness in his voice. Not for her. For HaShem, maybe, for forming humans to feel awe at the fires and floods He rained down on them.

  She yawned. “I’m sorry about—your house.” She had almost said “our.” She was far too tired. He should get her out of here before she said something stupid.

  “I could get another one,” he said instead, because just for this moment “I” meant “we” and they were the only people who knew that. “When this is over. If I wanted to.”

  That wasn’t room to breathe and it was also probably just another chance for her to break his heart, but he let it hang there anyway, long enough for her sleepy eyes to widen. When she started to look nervous, he asked her a question about the distribution of rations.

  After explaining, she asked, “Have you heard anything about old Mr. Nelson? Was he useful, or did he just have sentimental value?”

  “Word in camp has it that he told them Cornwallis has been hiding in a hole in his garden. I also heard he told them about General Clinton’s confidential communications from New York, but as I heard six different accounts of what the communications were, I don’t know if I credit it.”

  “Mm.” Her eyes drifted shut, hat sliding off her head into her lap. She didn’t pick it up.

  Nathan fought his instinctive impulse to cover her hair. Her observance of the Law was between her and HaShem.

  “It’s Shemini Atzeres,” he said. He shouldn’t be working on a holiday. But the soldiers needed to eat; that was a matter of life and death, surely. Everything felt like a matter of life and death now. “Simchas Torah begins tonight.”

  The name meant “Rejoicing with the Torah,” the day when the year’s reading through of the Torah was completed and begun again. In the ordinary course of events, it was celebrated with dancing in the streets, and much noise and sugarplums and wine. Very little of that was possible at the moment.

  “Mm,” she mumbled again. “We’ll…we’ll…”

  “Do you want to celebrate?”

  She made another exhausted sound of acquiescence. “Tonight. With Zvi.”

  He was quiet after that, to let her sleep. It wasn’t easy, but—

  She stirred uneasily. “Keep talking. Ssssss…’s’peaceful.”

  He caught his breath. His heart—it blossomed, in a shower of petals and warmth and a peculiar, aching pain.

  “In this week’s Torah portion, HaShem shows Moses the Promised Land,” he said. “But Moses never reaches it. We will. You and I are going to come out of the wilderness and drink our milk and eat our honey.”

  It was bad luck to say out loud, it was asking for trouble. But he needed to say it. He needed to believe they were going to survive this. Both of them.

  He’d thought for so long that even if he waded through this war to the other side, he’d have to stand on the far bank without her.

  He bent to his figures, calculating in as soothing a murmur as he could manage. The numbers arranged themselves perfectly this time, and Rachel began to snore.

  He hadn’t been able to say I forgive you yesterday, or it’s all right. But nothing was all right, anywhere in the colonies. What had he ever done or felt, himself, that was so deserving of praise? There were dark circles under her beautiful black eyes and dirt under her fingernails, and he didn’t feel angry anymore when he looked at her, only glad she was still alive and where he could see her.

  He should take her to her tent. She’d get a crick in her neck sleeping against his chair like that. He’d do it when he’d finished the week’s rations.

  “I forgive you,” he told her sleeping form, adding “for capturing me,” for the sergeant’s benefit. “It’s all right.”

  He understood now why she’d left. At first that understanding had seemed like a tragedy, almost a crime. An unbearable thing to carry in his heart. But maybe…maybe it was his chance to make her want to come back. Now he knew what he’d done wrong before, he could try not to do it again.

  She didn’t hate the sound of his voice, as he’d thought she might. That was something.

  When tattoo had at last been beat and the NCOs had made their nightly visits to the tents to see that the men were at least making a pretense of resting, Rachel and Zvi made their way to the guardhouse and were let into Nathan’s little room. The windowless cell was pitch-black. With the siege intensifying, the guards had been forbidden lights to avoid making their window a target and to keep their sight keen, and Nathan suffered with them.

  “We should have candles,” Nathan grumbled as Rachel and Zvi sat on the floor in a rough circle, hats respectfully kept on their heads. “It’s a mitzvah.”

  Rachel, too annoyed to answer, was glad when Zvi spoke up. “It’s a joyful holiday. Let’s say a shehecheyonu and try to be joyful, and not worry so much about details.”

  “Boruch atoh Adonoy,” Rachel started, and the others joined in. Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who gave us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this moment.

  Let us live to celebrate again next year, she added silently. Maybe no one was listening, but it couldn’t hurt. Spread the wings of Your protection over Scipio and Tench and Flanagan too, and over my squad. Please.

  “We can’t do any of the usual things,” Nathan said. “We don’t have a minyan, or a Torah, or enough wine to bring joy. I asked and the guards told me singing made too much noise. So let’s go around and each talk about the Torah for a minute.”

  Panic thumped in Rachel’s chest. What did she have to say about the Torah? She’d never even learned to understand Hebrew beyond a few common prayers. Only boys needed to know that.

  “I’ll start,” Nathan continued, because of course he did. “I’ve been thinking about legality, and morality, and civility, because I was reading Pilgrim’s Progress and I suppose to some people, those things are the enemies of faith. But when HaShem gave us the Torah, He told us He didn’t simply expect us to love Him more than we loved anything or anybody else. He told us that following His law and being fair to one another were the most sacred things we could do. And I want to thank Him for that.”

  His shackles clanked in the darkness as he tried to shift position. “In the first half of this week’s Torah portion, Moses dies before reaching the Promised Land. But in the second half we start again. We don’t even wait for next week to say, ‘In the beginning.’ In the beginning there was darkness, and the earth was formless and empty. I want to ask HaShem’s blessing for this new country we’re trying t
o create out of nothing. I want us…”

  He paused. It was dark in the little room, but Rachel could feel him look at her. “And by ‘us,’ I mean not only Jews but all of us, all Americans.”

  Rachel’s heart stuttered. He’d been listening when she said she wanted to be American. He’d remembered, and he’d made her hope a tenet of his faith.

  “I want us to fight to make this a place where justice and integrity and kindness are first in our hearts. I want us to create light after the darkness.”

  “Amen,” Zvi said, and Rachel hurried to echo him. Her voice came out a little hoarse, as if she’d scraped the last word from her empty throat. She felt—she felt as if she loved Nathan more than she loved anybody or anything else.

  It’s just a moment, she told herself. It’s just because he’s good at talking. Gam zeh ya’avor. Everything passes, and so will this.

  She waited for the moment to pass, and it didn’t.

  She’d forgotten what it felt like to love Nathan, the strength and joy of it. Affection overflowed her chest until it was impossible to believe she had ever felt anything like it before, until she couldn’t believe her body could hold one drop more. She felt a kind of wonder and awe at the mere fact that she hadn’t burst apart, or spat affection onto the dirt floor.

  Maybe she never had felt anything like it; maybe she’d needed to grow until she could hold it inside her. She was glad Zvi was here, because if he weren’t, she’d kiss Nathan and that would be a catastrophe.

  But why? she asked herself, forgetting that too. Forgetting everything but this feeling and how good it felt to be stretched and strained by it. Why would it be a catastrophe?

  Maybe love was beautiful, like Mount Sinai, and she’d been twisting it into an ugly black cliff belching flame.

  So you want to live with Mrs. Mendelson again? she asked herself, to calm the racing of her heart. You want to get kicked out of the army?

  “I’ll go next,” Zvi said after waiting politely and Rachel saying nothing. “I, um, I keep thinking about one of the very first laws You gave us. ‘Don’t kill.’ You told us not to kill and here we are, killing. But there are wars in the Bible, so maybe You just meant, you know, ‘Don’t murder.’ This isn’t murder, right? What they did to Colonel Scammell last week, killing him after he surrendered, that was murder, but in battle, it’s not?”

  He drew his bayonet from its sheath and laid it on the ground. “I’m a butcher, and I’m used to killing and blood. I remember the first time I slit a chicken’s throat, it horrified me, and now it’s nothing. I hate that killing men might feel like nothing after a while, too. So I want to pray that the war is over before the next new year.” He laughed. “Next year in Jerusalem, right?”

  “Amen,” Nathan said with conviction. Rachel’s was a thread.

  There was a long silence.

  “Ezra?” Zvi prompted.

  “I never…” It came out too quiet, and she had to begin again. “I never liked all the rules,” she said slowly. Talking to Nathan, really. “When I was a kid, I hated that I worked all week, helping my mother, and then on the only day we didn’t work, we couldn’t do anything because it was a day of rest. I hated all the things I had to memorize, and all the things I couldn’t eat and the places I couldn’t eat in and the people I couldn’t eat with. When I learned what the prayer we sing every Friday night meant, I laughed…that we knew God loved us with an eternal love because He gave us ‘Torah umitzvos, chukim umishpotim.’ The Torah and the Commandments, the laws and the precepts. I thought we were the fussiest religion in the world.”

  Nathan had been the one to translate the Shabbos prayers for her, horrified she’d been saying them every week her whole life without understanding above a tenth of the words. He’d leapt out of bed and fetched a prayer book and gone through them with his finger under the words. Most of them had disappointed her. They sounded so fine in Hebrew.

  “But I’ve realized since I enlisted that the rules we choose to follow make us who we are. If we want to stop being British, we have to follow the rules they won’t: don’t loot, don’t hurt civilians, don’t take unfair revenge on Loyalists, don’t starve prisoners, don’t beat a man after he’s surrendered. Even the little stupid everyday rules that don’t make any sense but some general thought they were a wonderful idea—well, I still hate them and sometimes I brush them aside, but even they bind us together, make us a community.”

  She laced her fingers tightly together. “I don’t follow every rule God gave us, and I probably won’t ever. But I’m glad He gave us the rules and made us who we are because I love us. I love being Jewish, and what…you said.”

  She couldn’t say Nathan’s name. It would make the moment too much, too intimate. “I like that Jewishness is about what you do, and not how much you say you believe in God in your heart.”

  “Amen,” Zvi said. Nathan followed suit a moment later. Rachel couldn’t tell how he felt about what she said. But it was the truth. That had to be good enough.

  October 12

  The Allies had opened a second parallel overnight under the noses of the British. They were razing Yorktown to the ground with their guns, pounding its few thousand square yards with dozens, maybe hundreds of rounds an hour.

  For Rachel and the rest of Colonel Hamilton’s battalion, it was a long day full of dull chores in camp and a constant earnest but triumphant gratitude that one wasn’t inside Yorktown. The neat little town was a slaughterhouse, spattered and dripping with blood.

  Since the enemy could more or less drop shells directly into the new parallel, only two hundred yards from the British lines, it was also a good day not to be inside the trenches. But Rachel tried not to feel triumphant or even too grateful for that. That kind of luck was always fleeting and could never be deserved.

  Her mess bought their dinner; Sarah Goodenough had been summoned to the hospital early in the morning to help with the heavy casualties, and kept there.

  Rachel was kept too busy to visit Nathan—at least, that’s what she told herself, and was glad of it. Even walking past the guardhouse sent a shock through her. Sitting beside him in the dark last night and listening to his voice had changed things, had pushed her past some boundary in her mind.

  It wasn’t lust and awkwardness she felt now—it was more like a fundamental recognition. The irksome fever of the last few days had become a steady, clear-burning flame.

  She didn’t like it. She didn’t like that her body had made some kind of decision without consulting her. She was a corporal, not a wife. She had chosen that.

  Everything turned on the success of this siege. She had drilled her squad, trained them, scolded them into cleanliness, tried to keep them healthy. Now she had to see them through this. She owed it to her comrades, her commanders, and her people. She owed it to Nathan. So they could all go home.

  Home.

  She was so tired. When had she last gotten a full night’s sleep? Now and then her mind dwelt peacefully on being a wife: on living quietly at home, on her greatest responsibility being a dinner served hot and on time. Lectures and ballads sounded like an awful lot of work.

  She liked that even less than she liked this love that sat like a smoothly polished stone behind her breastplate.

  October 13

  Rachel’s brigade relieved the trenches at noon, and around two o’clock marched into the second parallel to defend against any British assault.

  For the moment, the enemy were firing mainly on the French troops to their left. For days there had been rumors Cornwallis was running out of ammunition, and it was true that the British rarely seemed to concentrate their firing on more than one place at a time. But the siege stretched on.

  A battle was one sort of ordeal, and tedium another, but this buzzing, fearful waiting was almost worse than either. It gnawed at the army’s fraying nerves and wore away at their hope. Beside her, Scipio restlessly turned a piece of shrapnel over and over in his fingers.

  Surely the British co
uld not withstand this pounding forever. Surely soon they would pour out of the ravaged town and make a desperate attempt on the American guns.

  “I reckon Secretary Nelson is glad to be out of it,” one of the men said. “Did you hear one of his slaves was hit by a cannonball in his living room, just a few feet away from him?”

  “Yes,” Scipio muttered. “I’ve been hearing that all day, as if it’s a story about Mr. Nelson’s narrow escape and not about a human being who died because Mr. Nelson forced him to stay in a besieged city.”

  Mouth tight, he drew a square in the trench wall with his shrapnel. “Did you hear the one slave he brought out with him was carrying the family silver? Good to know he had some use that justified saving his life.” Slash, slash, slash, cutting the lines deeper in the dirt. “Nelson kept them there for his own convenience, and now he’s left them there defenseless for the same reason. Cornwallis won’t let them share his hole, I’m sure.”

  Only a week ago, Cornwallis had already turned out hundreds of escaped slaves who had fled to him for protection, because they were sick or he couldn’t feed them. They were dying in the forest around camp and all over the countryside.

  “Do you think anything will really be different after the war?” Rachel asked. She felt afraid even to voice the idea. Did one wilderness only give way to another, on and on into eternity? Did somebody always get left behind in the desert? She had felt so hopeful on Simchas Torah, hearing Nathan’s voice in the darkness. “Keynehore,” she muttered, warding off the evil eye, and wished Nathan were there to chime in with his learned Hebrew.

  Scipio hurled the shrapnel back at the British lines, a fierce, abortive motion. “It had better be.”

  As the sun sank low in the sky, camp followers began to bring men’s dinners into the trench. Rachel’s stomach grumbled as her squad cheerfully ate bread and nuts, but eventually Sarah came into view far down the trench, kettle held in apron-wrapped hands.

  Behind her trudged Nathan.