The Glendower Legacy

A MysteriousPress.com

Open Road Integrated Media

Ebook

For Rachel and Tom

I am not I;

he is not he;

they are not they.

Glendower

I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur

Why, so can I, or so can any man;

But will they come when you do call for them?

Glendower

Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command

The devil.

Hotspur

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil

By telling the truth; tell truth and shame the devil.

If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,

And I’ll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.

O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!

Shakespeare

Henry IV, Part I

Prologue

Bucharest: December 1975

Moscow: February 1976

Boston: March 1976

Monday

Wednesday

Thursday

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday/Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Epilogue

Cambridge

Florida

W
ILLIAM DAVIS STOOD SENTRY DUTY
ankle-deep in the crusty snow, watching the moon slide out from behind the clouds long enough to give the slopes above the Schuylkill River an eerie, metallic grayness—a bright, unearthly gray he’d never seen before. He shook his head: you couldn’t touch a color, he knew that, but this gray was something else, it was alive. But that was crazy. The hunger did bad things, not just to your guts but inside your head, too. He listened to his stomach rattle, empty but for the godawful firecake and rice … Firecake, invented in hell and sent by personal messenger to Valley Forge, a little flour, a lot of water, baked brittle and indigestible as a skimming stone on hot flat rocks. A bit of rice flavored with vinegar to keep away the scurvy.

Yet he knew he was one of the lucky ones: he had shoes, his feet were still feet, not bloody lumps dangling from scrawny ankles gone black with frostbite and gangrene, and he had a decent heavy coat, more new than old, sent him by his father back in Cambridge. He sighed and felt the breath crystallize on his moustache, in the hairs of his nostrils. His face felt like glass when he touched it. With the thick coat studded with heavy brass buttons he may well have been the best-dressed common soldier in the encampment, though the garment was already soaking up the thick smoke which hung impenetrably in each of the cabins built since their arrival on the bluffs above the Schuylkill … He dug his toenails into the soles of his boots until he was clenching his teeth against the pain.

God, how he hated the smoke and the cold and the firecake!

A thousand cabins had been built with axes the only tools. The thatched roofs leaked, the dirt floors never warmed, the green wood they used for fires was as bad as a smudge pot hurled by redcoats into each cabin …

But still he was not so badly off. His friend, Ben Edwards, twenty-two just like himself, had been without shoes, had stood guard with his raw feet in his hat, had fallen ill with the dysentery which had done for him a week ago … they had amputated his blackened, frozen legs before he’d died but it had been almost for practice. No way could poor old Ben have made it. The dysentery was so bad, it was everywhere, the cabins reeked of the godawful watery shit of the lads whose lives were draining right damn out of them.

The moon was gone again and the cloud cover looked suddenly thicker, permanent, making it a very dark night with only the wind shrieking against the tree line. He had to take a piss. He looked toward the thick stand of trees. He sure as hell wasn’t going to take a piss out here in the wind. He’d heard tell, in fact, of a man with a frozen thing—he’d heard tell it had just plain fallen off. He didn’t know if that was a true story but there was no point in finding out by personal test.

No, it could be worse, it was worse all around him. He had developed a case of the scabies, though, and when he scratched at himself he thought of the scabies as his war wounds. The only treatment was to have a friend rub your body with the stinking mixture of sulfur and tallow. Christ! Would he ever lie naked with a girl again? It surely seemed impossible while you were standing out in the cold feeling the sulfur and tallow half freeze on your chest and back. Yet, he smiled and heard his beard crackle, he was better off than most. You had to keep remembering that and it wasn’t always easy. Shit, there was a time at Germantown when he’d thought he was a goner for sure …

But to serve under General Washington, well, that was worth a lot of agony. That thought had gotten him through many a bad night and many a tough scrape, stories he’d someday tell his grandchildren … stories of the days he’d served in Washington’s army. What a man old George was! William had first seen him at Cambridge Common, a large, broad-bottomed, muscular figure, looking the way a soldier who would ask you to follow him into battle should look … almost a man to hide behind if the going got too tough.

He finally pushed off, sinking through the jagged snow with each step, toward the black mass of trees. The wind moaned the closer he got. He remembered how the dark forest used to frighten him as a boy back in Massachusetts. Now all it meant was shelter from the wind and a place to release himself. He grinned at the recollection of boyhood, heard his beard tinkle like breaking glass.

Oh, hell, he knew what some of his fellows said about Washington, the barbs and insults and rude behind-the-back gestures and unjust criticisms. He’d heard them all and he’d like to see them say it to old George’s face! Most of the dumb bastards couldn’t even read or write! Let ’em carp, damn fools … He’d heard other, wiser men say that no other army on earth could have stuck it out the way Washington and his men had. They’d earned the respect of the world, he’d heard them say. By jiminy, that told you all you needed to know about George Washington.

He did his business, felt his body relax out of the wind’s battering. Snow blew across the crust, rattled in the night, sifted among the trees. Nothing else moved along the tree line. He kicked a tree trunk, keeping the blood circulating. It was better sheltering there out of the wind. He felt in his pocket for his pipe, remembered he had run out of tobacco, stared into the darkness of the small forest that seemed so large. His eyes were adjusting to the deeper blue-black. Maybe a brief reconnaissance mission into the inviting shelter was called for: he wasn’t quite certain who he was guarding against out here in the cold but whoever, wouldn’t they be most likely to gather in the woods?

He picked up his musket which he’d rested against a trunk. It was like descending into a cave, the deep blue-blackness smelling only of the cold and snow closing in around him. Thirty yards into it he looked back but there was nothing to see, only darkness. Above him, glimpsed among the treetops, the clouds were only a shade or two toward gray. The fear he felt in his chest took him by surprise. He stopped, wiped clammy sweat from his forehead, and blinked. He’d heard of men getting lost in thickets, running themselves to death, hurtling wildly, breathlessly in circles until they fell and froze …

But panic wasn’t in his nature. He knew he was ten minutes from the tree line and he felt he could calmly feel his way back by following his tracks. He breathed deeply, peered around him.

That was when he first smelled smoke. He was too far from the encampment to smell those fires … He sniffed, closing his eyes. The wind that penetrated the woods carried the scent; as he turned, trying to judge the direction from which it came, it grew stronger. It was coming from deeper into the woods, no question of that, and his curiosity bloomed like a night flower. Who the devil could it be? Maybe one of the lads had wandered off, gotten lost, needed help. It was farfetched, but then Valley Forge was farfetched. He moved on toward the smell of smoke, forgetting the fears of a few moments before.

Another ten minutes of slow going and he stopped again. The smell was markedly stronger; William Davis was markedly tireder. He rested for a moment, then looked as determinedly as he could toward the apparent source of the smoke. Through the phalanx of trees he glimpsed for an instant a flickering flame, tiny, almost imperceptible but, yes, he was sure it was there. He was husbanding his strength, saw no reason to cry out. In any case, he was still too far away and the wind had picked up. He pushed on, the musket growing heavier with each step.

Moving closer he picked out shadows moving among the trees as the little gusts caught the fire, pushed it this way and that. Wind swirled around him as he picked his way through the snow which was softer in the woods, finer, not so deep. Next, much to his surprise, he caught snatches of conversation, voices borne on the wind, then gone, then back again … It obviously wasn’t some poor bastard who’d wandered off and gotten lost. There were several voices. He heard laughter, then the wind shifted and he was left in silence. But the glow of the fire was brighter and the trees were thinning. There was a small clearing ahead of him. He pushed closer, moving stealthily though he couldn’t have said precisely why.

He stopped at last at the edge of the clearing, still hidden in the darkness. There were three—no, four—men, large and bulky in greatcoats, standing and sitting around a fire in the shelter provided by a large lean-to. Their faces were obscured by shadow. They seemed intent on their discussion. As he watched he was conscious of sweat soaking his long underwear, turning it wet and cold against his flesh, making the damnable scabies itch like bites. He wasn’t sure what to do but he was quite sure of two things: he was inexplicably afraid and he wanted very much to find out who these men were …

All four were now seated. One of them pitched another log onto the fire. Unexpectedly the wind died. The silence brushed their voices closer, but he was concerned only with the sound of his own breathing which struck him as deafening. He held a glove to his mouth, sunk his teeth into it, half gagging. Words came to him from the men, words he could just distinguish without grasping their meaning.

He could not make out the color or markings on their greatcoats; everything looked uniformly black at this distance, in the shifting, blowing campfire light. But seeing the coats wasn’t necessary. He bit down harder on the glove, feeling his heart hammering, afraid. They were English, he’d have bet his life on it. He knew the accents: sure, the colonial gentry had that English sound when they spoke and many of them were as loyal as he was himself but the real English, from England, had a different sound. There was no mistaking it: he’d heard them all his life in Boston and he knew an Englishman’s voice. At least three of them were English but the fourth, a large squatting figure, close to the fire with his back to William, might have been anyone. He hadn’t spoken so far as William could tell, hadn’t moved except to reach forward and poke at the fire. He seemed to be listening, staring intently at the fire, while the others talked.

What in God’s name had he stumbled on? Was it the beginning of a surprise winter attack? The men had been told such a thing was impossible, that the winter was as cold for the Redcoats as for themselves … but what did a twenty-two-year-old foot soldier know about such things? It was all rumor and made-up stories and outright lies—maybe this was the beginning and, God forbid, maybe he was going to be the first victim …

He couldn’t hear the question but the squatting figure spoke, still looking at the fire. The other three stood or sat watching him, the firelight flickering on their featureless faces. He was an American.

“And how do
you
think the army is? Cold, starving, dying of dysentery, frightened.
I
am frightened myself, dealing with such as you … A knife in the back for my reward … That’s what frightens me, sir!” He spoke strongly and the words carried across the clearing, frustration and dark anger held only just in check. “You ask for information, you demand particulars—Heaven forfend! Look about you! General Winter, sir … An army of untrained citizens, without even the meagerest supplies—”

One of the Englishmen said something while another laughed. There was sympathy in the laughter, as if the man were afraid of further angering the American.

“No, damn you,” the squatting man said. “Do you think me mad? Deliver the army! Am I come so low as this, dealing with imbeciles?” He threw the log in his left hand into the fire. Sparks showered, flared. “No, I will not—
cannot—
deliver the Continental army! How can one man deliver an army, even such an army as this? There are great and honest men who will choose to fight to the death—brave men. Men who believe we can outlast you … And you, sirs, lead me to think they may be right, after all—”