Bunker Hill (6 page)

“I don’t
give a damn for your husband.”

“But I must give a damn for him, sir.”

“As you might for your father or your grandfather.”

“Your hand, Sir Henry.”
He
placed his hand upon the table, in conspicuous view. “You see, Sir Henry,” she
went on, “we all fight our battles as best we may, and we are all in some sort
of servitude. Isn’t that what your military discipline teaches you?”

“Don’t
make a fool of me.”

“When you are so willing to make a fool of me?”

“He’s old
enough to be your grandfather.”

“I think
we have whispered enough. A few minutes are permissible. More than that invites
scandal.” She raised her voice to catch her husband’s attention. “Sir Henry has
been amusing me with his experiences in Europe. What a sight it must be to see
two great armies in all their splendid ranks and uniforms meet in battle! I
should think that no sight in
all the
world can equal
it.”

“I would
think, my dear,” her husband replied, “that there is more agony than joy in a
battle. Wouldn’t you say so, Sir William?”

“Depends
on who wins and who losses.”

“As God wills it.
God has blessed England.”

“Not this
past April,” Gage said.

“That,”
said
Burgoyne,
“was not a battle, if you will forgive
me, Sir Thomas. They set on us like a pack of dogs, yet you brought our troops
out of their country. The battle still awaits us.”

“I
sincerely hope not,” said Margaret Gage.

“Then are
we to live forever in this beleaguered city?” the reverend asked.

Clinton
took the opportunity to whisper to Mrs. Hallsbury, “I must see you.”

“Perhaps.
If our fates will it.”

“To hell with our fates.
Tonight.”

“You know that is impossible.”

“Nothing
is impossible.”

“I am not
a British general, Sir Henry. I am a woman, and to a woman most things are
impossible.”

“Forgive
me.”

“There is
nothing to forgive. I would like very much to see you alone, but tonight is
impossible.”

“For five
minutes?”

“What will five minutes achieve?”

“Just to stand face-to-face with you, alone.”

Mr.
Stibble was talking about furniture. He had ordered a breakfront and ten chairs
from the workshop of Mr. Thomas Chippendale. He wanted Burgoyne’s opinion of
Mr. Chippendale’s work. Not that he would ever receive the shipment, the way
things were today, but only to know what he would miss.

Burgoyne
was bored with Mr. Stibble. To sit at dinner with a man of great wealth in
London, who might back a new play, was one thing; to do the same with a
Continental ass was an imposition. Before he had an opportunity to reply with a
sufficiently clever insult, Margaret Gage explained that the very chairs they
were sitting on were out of Mr. Chippendale’s workshop.

“Wait an
hour after you leave,” Mrs. Hallsbury whispered. “There is an arbor behind the
house.”

After they
had made their farewells, they went out to where Gage’s carriage was waiting.
Clinton said that he thought he would walk and clear his head. “I would not
advise it, Henry. The city isn’t safe at night.”

“Safe enough.”

“You’re not armed.”

“He’s
armed with his dreams,” Burgoyne said. “The lucky devil had all good things to
himself
. Do you want company, Henry?”

“I’d as soon be alone,” Clinton replied. “Thank you.”

As the
carriage drove off, Burgoyne said, “He’s a surly devil, isn’t he?”

“Ah, well,
that’s understandable. The place is new to him. We’ve all fought here in the
French wars.”

“He grew up here, didn’t he?”

“But not
as a soldier. He feels isolated. He can’t understand why we don’t take two
thousand regulars and march from one end of the continent to the other.”

“I think
you do him an injustice,” Margaret Gage said unexpectedly. “Perhaps he can’t
understand why there should be a war at all.”

Yet war
was as far from Clinton’s thoughts as China as he walked slowly through the
empty streets. It was almost midnight now, and the city was as dead and silent
as some ancient, abandoned ruin. Not a sound, not a voice, not a light in any
window. A pack of dogs
came
racing around a corner and
swirled around Clinton, who ignored them. He suffered from many difficulties,
but physical fear was not one of them. He found himself on King Street, and he
walked slowly out onto the Long Wharf. There were soldiers on guard there, and
they saluted him, but if they wondered what a general in full-dress regalia was
doing wandering around Boston at this time of the night, they kept their
silence and asked no questions. He walked to the end of the wharf. The moon was
in the sky now, and the June night was warm and pleasant.

Clinton
stood at the end of the wharf, staring at the dark hulks of the British
warships in the harbor. His ardor had cooled sufficiently for him to
contemplate himself, a process that never brought him great satisfaction. In
affairs of the heart or the groin, he always in time reduced his image to that
of a small boy, with a small boy’s voyeuristic dreams, and now the spectacle of
his headlong assault upon Mrs. Hallsbury made him feel both the fool and the
lout. Nevertheless, he had the appointment, and peering at his watch in the
pale moonlight, he realized that he had only enough time to return to the
assignation.

As he
walked back through the deserted streets, his process of self-examination
dwindled, and now he thought only of the fact that he had assaulted what was
certainly one of the most beautiful women in the colonies and won at least her
acquiescence,
and all of it in whispers at a dinner table
where her husband was present. With the name of Prudence she was either a
Puritan or a Presbyterian, which only meant that the fires had never really
been stoked. What had motivated her to marry the elderly High Church priest, he
could not imagine, except that Hallsbury was very rich and that a few years she
would endure as a wife might give her many years as a free and wealthy widow.
All of which meant that she was manipulative and calculating, and the thought
occurred to him that she had seduced him rather than the reverse. Well, be that
as it may, she was beautiful and clever, and more than that he asked of no
woman.

His first
reaction when he reached the house and moved stealthily through the garden to
the back door was one of wretched disappointment. She was not there, and he had
been made an utter fool. He stood in the moonlight, looking at the brick walks
that edged the herb and
rose
gardens, deflated and
humiliated, and then he heard her whisper, “Sir Henry?”

He turned,
and she was standing by the door. She came to him, took his arm, and silently
led him to a grape arbor at the back of the garden. Still, he had spoken no
word, and in the darkness of the arbor, he suddenly embraced her, found her
mouth and then her tongue darting between his lips like the quick thrusts of a
small snake. Then she drew away from him, breathing heavily.

In the
bits of moonlight that crept through the leaves, he saw her as a dappled,
shadowy figure in a long silken night robe. He reached out, then parted the
robe and fondled her breasts. She did not resist or indeed make any response,
and then he slipped the robe off her shoulders, and she stood naked in front of
him. He clutched her in his arms, kissing her face, her neck, and her shoulders.
She trembled and sighed and then pleaded with him, “Not here. Please, not
here.”

“I must
have you.”

“I know. I know.
But not here, not
tonight.”

“I must!”

“Tomorrow.
Please,” her
voice quite terror-stricken.

He let go
of her and stepped back, and she stood there naked, with her arms crossed over
her breasts. Then he picked up her robe and placed it over her shoulders,
feeling suddenly empty and deflated.

“Oh, God,
I’m so sorry,” she whimpered. “But he’s awake. Don’t you understand? He’s still
awake.”

“Will he
look for you?”

“I don’t
know. Call for me tomorrow.
To look at one of the warships.
He won’t mind that.”

“What
time?”

“When you please.
I’ll
wait. I must go. Give me a few minutes.” And with that, she fled from the
arbor.

There was
a bench in the arbor, and Clinton sat there for perhaps ten minutes. Then, as
he slipped away through the garden, a dog began to bark, and he found himself
half-running. He rounded a corner and, panting, slowed to a walk. The dog came
after him, a large brown mongrel beast, snapping at his heels. Clinton ignored
the animal, and presently the dog gave up the game and turned away. Clinton
walked on, trying to compose the events of the following day in his mind,
recalling that Howe had ordered a review of the grenadiers for the fourteenth
of June, trying to remember what time the event was scheduled so that he could
think of some excuse that would allow him to be elsewhere.

On the
other hand, why not invite her to the review—unless that would bring her
husband along with her. The old man was quite a fire-eater. As this and that
plan went through his mind, he found himself losing interest. It had been a
full day; he would think about it tomorrow. He recalled the feel of her naked
body, her lips, her breasts, and slowly a feeling of satisfaction replaced his
sense of loutishness and loss.

The two
guards at the door of the house where he was quartered regarded him without
curiosity. They were well trained. Had he come in with Mrs. Hallsbury upon his
arm, they would have been equally graven and silent.

Slowly, he
climbed the stairs to his rooms. It had been a long day, and he was, after all,
forty-five years old. His sitting room was empty. O’Brian should have been
waiting there with warm water and freshly done nightclothes, and his first
impulse was to fling open the door and roar out the bastard’s name. Then he
realized that the house was asleep. Burgoyne and their aides would not bless
him for awakening them at this hour, unless, of course, they were still away, bedded
down in the arms of less fettered Boston ladies.

His eyes
drifted around the room. The candles had been lit no more than an hour before,
so O’Brian must have been there and then given up like the lazy bastard he was.
He wondered whether Mrs. Hallsbury’s sitting room had this same restrained
elegance that one found among the upper classes in the colonies: the
hand-blocked wallpaper, the simple yet lovely wing chairs that flanked the
fireplace, the oriental rugs, the plain yet beautiful silver that they wrought
so well in America—all of it carefully protected by Sir William’s mania against
looting. At least that—and beyond her sitting room, what? Would she be in bed
with the old man now, warming his cold, ecclesiastical bones?

He sighed
and went into his bedroom, pulled off his boots, and began to strip himself of
his uniform. He was naked except for his singlet when he heard the door to his
sitting room open and then a light knock on his bedroom door.

“Come in,
you wretch,” he said, thinking that it was O’Brian.

It was
Mary O’Brian who opened the door and
entered,
a
pitcher of warm water in one hand and his freshly laundered nightdress over her
arm. She had washed her hair and set it up high on her head, and she was clad
in a long linen robe that fell to her ankles yet revealed the curves of her
full, womanly figure. There was just the slightest smile upon her lips, and as
earlier in the day, she accepted his nakedness matter-of-factly. She laid the
nightdress upon the bed, poured water into the hand basin, and then dipped a
towel into the water and squeezed it out.

“Where’s
O’Brian?” Clinton asked her.

“Sleeping, the lazy pig.
Take off the shirt, General, and I’ll be refreshing you.”

He stared
at her for a long moment, pulled his singlet off over his head, and then stood
by the bedside while she sponged his body with the towel. Then she took a fresh
towel and dried his body, her fingers gently massaging his flesh through the
cloth. He had no thoughts in his mind, indeed no mind at all, only a luxurious
sense of the passion rising inside of him. She finished drying him,
then
turned down the covers of his bed.

“Will ye
be wanting a nightdress,
me
lord?” she asked, a note
of archness creeping into her voice.

He shook
his head.

“Then will ye have the left or the right side of the
bed, me lord.”

“I am no lord, as you damn well know.”

“In my eyes,
me
lord.”

He grinned at her, and she grinned back.