Will and Homer rode north against a tide of people heading for the waterfront to take in the scene. The stolen pass got them through the city’s defenses without a second glance by the guards who were far more interested in the fleet’s arrival. Once outside of the city, Manhattan Island was scarcely occupied. An occasional farmhouse broke the monotony as they rode north, but there were few of those and a number of them had been destroyed. Charred ruins near the road showed that hard times and years of warfare had fallen upon the people who had attempted to live there. The fertile land was strangely barren. The trees had been cut down for firewood, and only high weeds grew where once there had been forests.
A number of miles farther on along the trail called the Post Road, Will gazed wistfully at the Harlem Heights where the rebel army had handed the Redcoats a bloody nose following the overwhelming British victory at Long Island. The British had thought the Americans were finished, but they’d been wrong. Will prayed they were wrong again and that there really was a place called Liberty. But the feeling of depression returned when they passed by the site of Fort Washington, where more than two thousand Americans had been captured by the British.
When they finally reached the Harlem River, more than a dozen miles north of the city, it was getting dark and only a couple of very bored British soldiers examined Will’s pass. A dozen others and an ensign commanding them lounged around a dilapidated farmhouse a hundred or so yards away. One scrawny white man and a colored servant were not a threat to their safety. The soldiers were even friendly, and Will allowed himself a moment’s fleeting sympathy for them. This wasn’t their war either. The soldiers said that they were annoyed at the arrival of the fleet and the thousands of reinforcements General Burgoyne had brought with him. The soldiers and sailors would be additional competition for the city’s whores.
Will grinned in mock sympathy. “Don’t worry. I understand most of the women in New York are whores already, so there’ll be plenty to go around.” It was almost the truth. Someone had calculated that one in five women in New York were prostitutes, while others had jokingly said it was the other way around.
The soldiers laughed appreciatively and let the two men pass onto Dykeman’s Bridge that took them across the river. When they were several miles farther away, Will and Homer paused. It was night and the moon gave only a little light.
“This is where we part,” Homer said.
Will nodded. He was on his way to Connecticut to see if a piece of property owned by his family still existed. He wasn’t certain what he’d do when he got there. It was just a small dairy farm, but it was a link to his past and had been in his family for generations. If asked by anyone along the way, he would continue to be the late and unlamented Thomas Wolfington.
“Not going back to New York?” Will teased. “What about returning the horse and wagon?”
Homer grunted. “Fuck the guy who rented them to me and fuck New York. Nothin’ there but Redcoats wanting me to shine their boots or kiss their asses. And like you said, all the women are whores even though all the money in the world won’t get them to fuck a black man. No, I’m on my way to Boston.”
“Homer, there are even more Redcoats there. It’s almost a prison.”
“I ain’t that stupid, Will. I’m just going near Boston. The British are only in the city, not the surrounding area. I understand that the people up there are a lot nicer to colored people than elsewhere in the colonies. Who knows, I might even get laid. And you? Where will you go after you’ve satisfied your curiosity about that farm?”
Will had given that a lot of thought. He wondered if he’d be able to escape his past and live peacefully as a civilian farmer. Then he wondered if he even wanted to be a farmer. He’d studied for the law, but soldiering was almost all he knew. And he was damned certain he didn’t want to be a farmer under an English yoke.
“You’re going to wind up at Liberty, aren’t you?” Homer chuckled.
“If there is such a place. Maybe it’s mystical, like Camelot, and doesn’t even exist?”
“I have no idea what this Camelot is, Will, but if it doesn’t exist, then why are the British going to send an army against it? Naw, Will, there’s something out in the west and I don’t know if it’s called Liberty, or Fort Washington, or Jerusalem, or what in hell. But odds are, that’s where you’ll wind up”
Chapter 2
Governor General Sir Charles Cornwallis received his younger brother William in his private quarters in Fort George on lower Manhattan. They embraced fondly.
“Thank God, a friendly face,” the recently appointed governor general of the thirteen colonies said.
Sir Charles Cornwallis’ responsibilities were awesome, since they included both civil and military matters, and he looked tired and haggard despite being refreshed at meeting his brother. Privately, he sometimes wondered if he’d been rewarded or punished with this high office.
He’d recently been particularly distressed when one of the prison hulks had fallen apart and disgorged more than a hundred emaciated prisoners into the river where most of them drowned. Until then, he’d naively assumed that the civilian contractors who were running the prison ships were at least doing what they were being paid to do-feed, clothe and shelter the prisoners at a minimal level until London could figure out what to do with them. Embarrassed and ashamed at what he’d seen and belatedly recognized, Cornwallis had ordered the surviving prisoners out of all the hulks and into warehouses where British soldiers now guarded them and assured that they received sufficient food and at least a decent level of comforts. A recent inspection showed most of them improving and he’d sent a message to Lord Stormont describing what he’d found and how he hoped it wasn’t being repeated in other prisons where rebels were being held. He’d heard rumors that conditions for senior rebels in Jamaica were even more vile. The rebels deserved to be punished severely, but not starved and abused until they died.
“Good to see you as well,” William said. “And how’s the luckiest man in the world this day?
It was a joke they shared every one of the infrequent times they got together. The elder Cornwallis’ victory at Yorktown had been as unexpected as it was total. On the verge of surrender, his men starving and out of ammunition, the relieving British fleet had arrived with both supplies and reinforcements. That they’d also destroyed a poorly handled French fleet under Admiral DeGrasse in the great victory at the Battle of the Capes had been an added bonus.
Refreshed in mind and body, the British had surged out of their fortifications and defeated the now dispirited combined French and American forces. The defeat had turned into a rout and the rout into a slaughter in which the rebel army had been destroyed and George Washington taken prisoner.
William, known as “Billy Blue” behind his back, took a brandy from his older brother. “My voyage with General Burgoyne was fine and thank you for asking. Now, what are you going to do with the great man and the little army he’s brought over?”
Charles Cornwallis chuckled. “I suppose I’ll obey my orders, presuming they make any sense. Of course, I’m not sure it makes any sense at all to ship an army, however small, over here when the real war is taking place in France.”
Shortly after the French and American collapse, an attempt by the French monarchy to raise taxes to pay for the debacles had resulted in France being torn apart by a sudden and violently anti-monarchist revolution. The new taxes had started a civil war that was rending France into bloody pieces. Horrified by the violence of the revolution in France, and tormented by the possibility of a similar republican uprising in England, King George III had sent over an army led by Lord Jeffrey Amherst to France to help the monarchists crush the revolution. France was where most professional soldiers wished to be and was where Charles Cornwallis thought he should be. Still, he had doubts. Yorktown had taught him the fickleness of fate on the battlefield.