I knew that I was not playing this thing anywhere near as calmly as I hoped I was.
“Please read that page to me.”
“Er,” I looked up, as if bewildered.
“Read it.”
“Two hundred lost years,” I muttered. The book was subtitled: “What the World might have looked like if George Washington had ducked at the right time!”
I had to smile; I could not help myself.
“By a Son of Liberty…”
I made as if to thumb deeper into the book, which was old, dog-eared and smelled musty. The dust jacket had long since disintegrated and the front and back boards were scratched, scuffed and a little deformed, probably by dampness. However, the spine was relatively sound and it looked as if all the pages were still in situ…
“Please turn to page twelve, Professor,” Lieutenant Adams put to me like a threat. “Start reading at the beginning of the second paragraph and don’t stop until I tell you to.”
Shit! Shit! Shit!
They would be taping this whole thing and sometime later today some goddammed voice expert would be comparing my voice with thirty-year-old tapes.
“Today would be good,” Danson suggested tight-lipped.
I cleared my throat.
Remembered my mug of tea, took a couple of mouthfuls to wet my suddenly arid throat and to lubricate my larynx one last time before these comedians gave it a good stretch at the end of a rope…
“George Washington suffered adversity with the cool dignity that he welcomed success. Reportedly, he re-assured his men that ‘our guns will put those frigates in their place’, waving at the Upper Bay. Hulks had been sunk in the East River and any warships foolhardy enough to brave sailing into Buttermilk Channel between Governor’s Island and the coast would surely be roughly handled. But there were so many damned ships…”
The words seemed familiar and yet strange; it was the feeling one sometimes gets looking at pictures of oneself as a child or as a young man when everything was different and the world so replete with possibilities.
“Washington had ridden down to Fort Stirling opposite the southern tip of Manhattan to supervise the first companies preparing to board the boats now straggling across the mouth of the East River towards the Ferry Pier by the time he encountered Thomas Mifflin’s men trotting down to the shore. He was aware that scores of men had already deserted the lines on Brooklyn Heights and had detailed officers to staunch the tide. Mifflin’s men would not be turned back and on the high ground to the east the remaining defenders could clearly see their fellows deserting the defence works around them. Briefly, Washington’s presence calmed what might have turned into a riot.”
I made every pretence of having to read the text closely as if I had no idea what lay in the next sentence, paragraph, page or chapter.
“The first men were embarking on the rescue boats when the guns of the frigates Phoenix and Rose and the 54-gun ship of the line Antelope began to engage the forts defending the mouth of the East River. Six, twelve, eighteen and twenty-four-pound round shot began to skim through the helpless flotilla straggling across the East River. The first broadside, probably from one of the frigates raked Fort Stirling. At first the ships out in the Upper Bay took a battering but inexorably, they came closer and closer inshore, as if pressed by the weight of the big ships entering those enclosed waters behind them, duelling and subduing the batteries at the southern tip of Manhattan, on Governor’s Island and Fort Defiance on Red Hook.”
When I was a boy I used to walk across the nineteenth century causeway to Red Hook and explore the ruins of the old fort; the Royal Navy took over the island – more an isthmus now that so much land has been reclaimed from the sea around it – in the 1930s. I would stand on the rubble, gaze out across the Upper Bay and imagine the sight which might have greeted an onlooker as dawn broke that morning.
“The Antelope’s foremast crumpled and went over the side but her captain merely anchored his command and, ignoring the fire from the gunners at Fort George – whose efforts were now much inconvenienced by the smoke blowing away from the ships and over the southern extent of Manhattan – poured a withering barrage into the men gathering, mostly cowering, south and east of the now smashed Ferry Pier. Meanwhile, on the heights the Hessians had carried Fort Greene by force majeure and everywhere the Brooklyn Heights line was buckling, splintering into a hundred, desperate close-quarter battles in which the part-time riflemen of the Continental Army were helpless before the bayonets of the British Redcoats and the tide of German mercenaries.”
The carnage around the wrecked Brooklyn Ferry Pier must have been indescribably. What might, wind and military competence permitting have been a classic evacuation of a besieged force under fire swiftly turned into a nightmarishly bloody rout.
“It is not known at what point in the battle George Washington was dashed from his horse. As the sun rose over Brooklyn Heights the warships were so close in shore they were firing grape and chain-shot into the Continentals milling very nearly within hailing distance. ‘Grape’ was like being blasted by a giant shotgun with balls of buckshot an inch in diameter; ‘chain’ was what it said it was, chains attached to iron bars normally employed to rip up another ship’s rigging. Suffice to say that the decapitated body of the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army was identified the next day lying some one hundred yards east of the site of the Brooklyn Ferry Pier…”
I made a point of pausing and studying the spine of the book as if I was still curious about its title.
“I didn’t tell you to stop reading, Professor,” Lieutenant Adams reminded me.
I had not really bought any of that horse manure about her being a plain clothes cop with the Royal Military Police; she had the look and emitted the bad vibes more characteristic of the Crown’s secret policemen, and now it seemed, women, too.
I had no idea what department she might work for.
I had been out of that game thirty years; ever since I hooked up with Rachel and as for the Sons of Liberty, heck, that was all ancient history like the Greeks and Trojans.
“Unlike so many of his fellows the British initially interred George Washington’s body in a marked grave somewhere in the earthworks of Fort Stirling. Some years later it was believed to have been exhumed and re-buried in consecrated ground associated with St Thomas’s Chapel, a Lutheran house which once stood on the Old Jamaica Road but was demolished sometime in the 1870s.”
I looked up and met the woman’s stare.
I realised she was older than I had guessed, maybe in her early thirties and she did not quite have the scrubbed and polished, unnaturally immaculate aura of a real Redcap
She nodded towards the book.
“The British did not call a halt to the bloodletting until the end of November 1776. By then three of Washington’s five generals at the Battle of Long Island – Israel Putnam, Henry Knox and William Alexander – had been executed for high treason, Thomas Mifflin whose negligence had hastened the rout was a prisoner of war, as was John Sullivan who had been captured the previous day.”
I suppose I ought to have been more scared.
“A lot more is known about the battle and the ‘cleaning up’ operations which went on throughout the rest of 1776 and the first half of the following year. King George III – German George as the colonists called him – wanted all the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, that ‘heinous treachery’, hung, drawn and quartered but much to his chagrin his ministers told him ‘we didn’t do that sort of thing anymore.”