“Hurry it up,” muttered North futilely. There would be a deliberate pace to this sad event.
The guards guided the man to the block. He did not struggle or protest. They pushed him to a kneeling position.
“Not yet,” bellowed Burke.
“He had a fair trial,” North said angrily. “Not that he deserved one. He was found guilty of treason and an armed rebellion that took years to quell. It nearly broke the treasury, and almost brought England to her knees. He deserves the justice we are about to meet out.”
“Has he any last words?” Burke asked. “Prisoner, speak now if it is your wish.”
“Or forever hold your peace,” laughed North and turned to his companions. “Damned difficult to converse with a headless man, I dare say.”
The prisoner looked up. His eyes were alert. There was surprising force and strength behind them. He smiled so his bare gums didn’t show, proving that the man still had his pride.
“I will only say that you can never win,” he said through tight lips. “This sad day merely delays the inevitable. You can never stop men from being free.” With that, he turned away disdainfully. “Do your duty and be damned to you,” he said to the executioner.
“Not very eloquent for a man’s last words,” said one of North’s toadies.
The prisoner laid his head on the block and signaled to the executioner who raised his ax and lowered it in one brutally swift and efficient movement. The small crowd gasped involuntarily as the separated head rolled onto the ground as blood gushed from the torso.
“Dear God,” that same toady said and began to puke. Fitzroy hoped he ruined his lovely yellow leather shoes as he felt his own gorge rise. He controlled himself with great effort. He wondered what the young royals hiding above were thinking. Or were they also puking? He thought he heard the muffled sounds of screaming and crying. Good, he thought, learn what death is about.
The executioner reached for the head. He found a handful of hair and held it up, dripping blood onto the ground. For a horrible instant, Fitzroy thought the man’s eyes were yet alive and glaring at him, blaming him. Then they glazed over and the jaw went slack.
“Death to traitors,” said Lord North and others took up the chant. Even the shivering Germain managed a wan smile. Fitzroy noticed that Burgoyne was silent, as were Stormont and Burke. It didn’t matter.
It was 1783 and George Washington was dead.
Chapter 1
Deep inside the bowels of the Suffolk, a once proud merchant frigate, Will Drake thought he felt the rotting hulk of the prison vessel move. He paused in fear. The ship was a derelict. She had no masts, merely grotesque stubs that looked like broken teeth showing where they once had been. She was anchored at the end of a dock, parallel to the shore, and was thought to be thoroughly wedged in the mud and thus immune to wind and storm. She couldn’t move. She barely shifted and quivered with the tide, although the ship sometimes creaked and moaned as if it was alive and ashamed of its current life. The Suffolk and two others rotted silently off the city of New York in the Hudson River.
Will gathered his strength and moved to a higher deck in the hull of the large ship. He’d thought that the Suffolk had likely sailed to China and India, which explained the double rows of gun ports to protect her from pirates. Now it was going to be his coffin. He looked at his gaunt and terrified fellow prisoners and some of them shared his concern as to the ship’s unexpected and frightening movement. Most of the other men consisted of little more than a layer of skin over a skeleton, and were too far sunk in despair and sickness to notice or care. Whatever happened, they would be dead in a very short while.
The Suffolk had been Will’s prison for almost a year and a half, although she and her sister ships had been convict ships for many years before. Will had been taken prisoner by the British when Clinton’s army had burst out of New York following the catastrophic American defeat at Yorktown and the subsequent collapse of the Revolution. It was just plain bad luck that a Redcoat patrol had found him and even worse luck that he had been identified by a man who knew him and told his captors that he was an officer.
It was then that he realized the rules of war had changed. Hitherto, officers had been kept in reasonably pleasant circumstances until either paroled or exchanged, while the enlisted men lived lives of privation and squalor. This was because the British feared retaliation against their own officers. Now, with the rebellion crushed, there was no need for niceties and Will quickly understood that the victors wanted the rebellion’s leaders permanently out of the picture. Most of the newly captured enlisted men had been flogged, branded, and released, while the men currently entombed in the hulks were officers and quietly forgotten. Cornwallis now commanded in New York and he was considered to be a hard man, but Will wondered if he was this cruel? After the agonies of branding and flogging, the British kept lower-ranking officers like Drake in floating hells like the Suffolk. Senior ones had been shipped away, either to England for trial or prisons in the tropics.
Will had managed to survive, but it hadn’t been pleasant or easy. By the time he’d been caught, many of the hundreds jammed into the filthy hold of the Suffolk had been weakened or would soon be dead. He’d quickly realized that being Christian or noble simply meant dying sooner rather than later. He’d swallowed his pride and his scruples and done what was necessary to continue living as long as he had. He’d taken food and the rags that passed for clothing from the obviously unconscious and dying and the recently dead, doing so before anybody else could get to them; thus keeping a semblance of his strength. He’d fought for positions in the ship that were relatively dry, or weren’t suffocatingly hot in summer, or freezing in winter. There was no comfort to be had in the stinking bowels of the prison ship at any time.
All the time he’d done this, Will had begged God for forgiveness and cursed the British for putting him in this horrible position.
Fortunately, the British guards on the Suffolk were lazy and incompetent swine who spent most of their time drinking the cheap gin or rum they’d bought by selling provisions meant for the prisoners. The guards had no idea how many men were down below since the prisoners, with Will’s connivance, had stopped sending corpses up to be taken away as that would only mean a reduction in their already inadequate food ration. Instead, the prisoners kept the rotting corpses in the lower holds until the bones could be slipped out through the barred gun ports at night. Thus, as the numbers of prisoners declined, the amount of food each of the survivors received actually increased, despite the pilfering from the guards. The additional stench from the rotting bodies was scarcely noticed.
They rarely lacked for drinking water, even though it was frequently foul. They were north of the city of New York and high enough up the Hudson River so that only the strongest of incoming tides or storms would make the water undrinkable. It was often brackish, but rarely so salty that it couldn’t be drunk. Other hulks lay off Brooklyn, in the East River, where the water was tidal, brackish and generally undrinkable. Will and the others on the Suffolk were actually the lucky ones.