He glared at the women. One he noticed was rather young, fourteen at the most. More likely twelve, he thought.
“You want to ever see your menfolk again? Then you do as you’re told, you hear?”
One of the women, the oldest at maybe forty, nodded. “Why are you doing this to us?”
“Because you’re rebels, that’s why.”
“Not true,” she said. “We ain’t nobody’s people. We just want to worship our God in peace. That’s why we came here. We don’t want no part of no war. We are peaceable people of God.”
“No peace here, woman,” Braxton said, “and no God either. Now you’re gonna do as you’re told if you want your men to be alive when we leave here. Strip.”
The women gasped and stared at each other. Braxton snarled. “Either you do it or my men will rip them rags off you right now.”
“Obey him,” the older woman said and made to comply. Within a few moments, the four were naked, including the injured one who had to be helped out of her clothing. The younger one was sobbing and trying to cover herself with her hands. She had small, bud-like breasts and just a wisp of hair between her thighs. Braxton thought she was maybe twelve, and not fourteen as he’d first guessed. It excited him. He liked them young.
Braxton took the young one by her wrist and dragged her into the house and into a bedroom. He heard his men starting to have their way with the older women who began to howl in terror and pain.
He threw the girl on the bed and she punched at him, hitting his still raw face. The sudden pain was intense and nearly stopped him, but he overcame it and struck her hard until she whimpered and lay still. She screamed the first time he took her, but not the second or third. She didn’t scream again until he turned her over to his men. Not all of them took her. A few complained that she was too skinny or still a kid. He thought she was likely dead when she and the other women were piled on top of the bodies of the men and children in the barn, which was then burned. He didn’t care.
As they took off with their plunder, Braxton was satisfied. He’d wiped out another nest of rebels at a cost of two men slightly wounded. He hoped Tarleton would be pleased. Tarleton frightened him.
* * *
Will and Sarah walked arm in arm through the muddy streets of Fort Washington. There was a chill in the air, and a light snow had fallen early that morning. Nothing had stuck, but it was an unsubtle reminder that winter was almost upon them. Sarah wondered if would be appropriate or just too shocking to wear men’s trousers when the weather worsened. She had arrived with little in the way of feminine clothes and there wasn’t much available in a town that was basically a military post. She would have to ask Abigail Adams. Franklin, she was certain, wouldn’t care at all. She knew he would smile like a cherub and say she could work naked if she so liked.
“What are you going to do now,” Sarah asked Will. She knew from his already familiar actions, that something was up.
“I guess you can keep a secret,” he said with a grin. “Not that there’s any British around you’d blab to, but I’m going east. We’re going to keep people on watch at Detroit and Pitt and it’s my turn to go to Detroit. I’ll check things out for a while, be replaced, and return.”
“What do you expect to find?”
“A British army that’s growing bigger and stronger each day.”
She shuddered and not from the cold. “Then they will come for us and finally destroy us, won’t they?”
“Not if I can help it,” he said and quickly realized how foolish it sounded. How could he, one man, stop a British army? Thankfully, Sarah seemed not to have noticed it.
Sarah changed the subject. “Mr. Franklin is a great man.”
“So I’ve heard. However, isn’t he getting just a wee bit old?”
She laughed. The great man was maddeningly and intentionally imprecise as to his age. It was presumed that he was at least in his middle seventies and possibly older.
“In some ways, he is old. He tires easily and it frustrates him because there’s so much that he wants to do and feels needs to be done. In other ways, he’s a child filled with wonder at the world around him, and, in still other ways, he is a genius. Have you heard his latest?”
“No.”
“Well, after spending all his days trying to get the fools in Congress to institutionalize a form of government, he has devised a new way of making guns.”
“He what?”
“Indeed,” she said with some pride. She had become deeply fond of the old man. “It occurred to him that guns are made by gunsmiths, but that we have very few of them here at Fort Washington. Therefore, he said we had to make them without gunsmiths.”
“Sounds logical,” Will said. She was leaning against him and he could feel the pressure of her breast against his arm. Perhaps if he kept her talking they could walk forever.
“And logical it is, Will. He decided that we-I mean, the army-should only make simple weapons and that we should make them by making a large number of barrels, then make stocks and then triggers. If they were made simply enough, they should all fit together and we could make a large number of weapons very quickly.”
Will found the concept intriguing and said so. “But what sort of weapons are they?”
“He’s toyed with several types. But right now he’s working on one that almost looks like an old blunderbuss. They have broad barrels into which powder is poured, and then followed by whatever is going to be fired-lead bullets, glass, stones. He thinks the effect will be devastating at short range. Franklin’s going to have them demonstrated later.”
“I would like to see that,” Will said, and made a mental note to find out more from Tallmadge.
* * *
Major James Fitzroy was surprised and delighted when Hannah Doorn informed him that she and a woman servant were coming with him to Detroit, or at least with the army. He was unused to women making pronouncements concerning his life, but he accepted without hesitation. He was genuinely fond of her, and her presence would more than brighten up what promised to be a dismal winter in a miserable location-Fort Detroit. His planned trip to find Tarleton had been cancelled when information was received that Tarleton had gone to Detroit, instead of staying at Pitt.
Hannah also reminded him that she had business interests in Detroit, which would more than pay for any inconvenience he might feel about having to support a poor woman. She was, thank you, more than able to support herself. He’d long since concluded that Hannah Doorn was a very clever woman. She’d gotten around those laws that restricted ownership of property by women by using a cousin as a front for a small percentage. Or she simply ignored them. He’d concluded that much of the property she owned was still in her late husband’s name and no one cared.
“Damned if it isn’t strange,” he’d told Danforth over brandies, “but the Dutchie women seem to be at least as smart about business as the men are. Must be the air here in the colonies.”
Danforth pretended to shudder. “Thank God it’s different in England where women know their place, which is either in bed with their legs spread or in the kitchen with their legs together.”
Fitzroy was more than surprised to find that Hannah was in a partnership with a Jewish merchant who had a store in Detroit.
“After all,” he’d told her, “don’t they delight in cheating Christians?”
“I’ve known Abraham Goldman and his family since I was a little girl and he had a similar arrangement with both my father and my husband. I don’t think he would cheat me. Each year, I receive an amount of money as my share of the venture we own jointly.”
“I see,” Major Fitzroy had said, not certain he saw anything at all.
“And they don’t eat Christian babies either,” she’d laughed, and he happily admitted he really didn’t think they ever did.
They traveled by wagon from Albany north and then west to Oswego, a decrepit and nearly abandoned site on Lake Ontario that was being rejuvenated by the British for the coming campaign. Burgoyne commented without apparent bitterness, that the direction they were taking took him away from the site of his defeats in 1777, at Saratoga. It was, he informed all, a part of his life that should remain closed except for the obvious lessons to be drawn from it.