Jack Absolute (41 page)

‘I did.’

He hesitated but he needed to know. ‘And did you tell him much of us?’

Even within the darkness of the brick hole, he could see the light pour into her eyes.

‘No, Jack. I told him nothing of that. I thought,’ she sighed, ‘I thought I could keep it separate. We had not much contact
after we arrived, for he went off to St Leger’s expedition and then on to here. But a week ago, that night,’ she bit her lower
lip, looked away for a moment, ‘that night when you and I … later, I told him everything. I’m so sorry. But I did not
know what you would choose to do, whether you would betray me or no.’

‘You did not know? How could you not know?’

‘I was confused – by everything. The feelings I’d had, our … coming together.’ Her eyes suddenly lost their sadness. ‘You
must remember that unlike you, sir, I had had little experience of such matters. While you … Gemini! They wrote a play about
your
amours!’

He smiled. The innocent country maid was so well done. ‘And you mistook the Jack Absolute of the stage for myself. Understandable,
madam. And forgiven.’ He peered in, made sure she could see his eyes. ‘I mean it, Louisa. Von Schlaben. Everything. Forgiven.’

‘But you will die because of it.’ The maid had gone.

‘Well,’ Jack smiled, ‘dead for love? I can think of worse causes. I am a little old to play Romeo – though Spranger Barry
still does at Covent Garden and he has twenty years on me – and yet, oh, that we had that phial of poison and a dagger. We
would cheat them of their show today.’

‘I would not,’ she said, her chin rising, only the slightest quaver to her voice, ‘for I would show them how a true patriot
can die.’

Death had entered their cell again, in their conversation, in the intrusion of a drum beginning to beat outside. They could
hear the tread of soldiers marching into the square. The clock tolling the quarter-to.

She leaned in again, her tone softened, though there was an urgency to it as well. ‘Do you believe in a heaven, Jack?’

He hesitated. Comforting words or his own confusion? What did it matter now? But she went on. ‘Because I do. I’ve thought
of it often, these last days. Not the place commonly described. No clouds, no angels, no bands of the righteous sitting at
God’s right hand. I’ve met the righteous and they are dull company. No, my heaven is a farm, like the one
where I was born in Cherry Valley. An orchard in full bloom; water meadows thick with spring grass, cows …’

Her voice caught and he saw the first tears come. She had stopped, was staring away, into her vision and he wanted her back
with him – or to join her there. ‘Isn’t there a forest too? Yes, I can see it. Maple, oak, beech, hickory for the nuts in
the autumn. Até will live nearby, and we will take our sons out to hunt and bring back buck and grouse for you and our daughters
to cook.’

‘Our daughters?’ He had her again, a smile on her face, full of mock anger.
‘Our
daughters will be with you on the hunt, Mr Absolute, learning as I did. On the frontier, the women must match the men in
all.’

‘Aye, they must,’ he said, ‘and ours will be as fierce and beautiful as their mother.’

‘How many will we have?’

‘A dozen at the least. Six of each.’

‘La, sir. You will have me occupied.’

‘For ever,’ he said, the word bringing the silence again and with it the world entering with the sudden cessation of the drum,
with the increased hum of the crowd, with the steps in the corridor outside, pausing outside his door, moving on, halting
before hers. With one bolt being thrown.

They had come for her first. Oh, God, why had they come for her first?

‘Jack,’ she said.

‘Yes.’

He thrust his hand into the gap. She placed hers there, stretched towards his. The bricks were of no height, the gap so narrow.
They struggled, pushed. Another jerked bolt sounded through the tiny hole. Then, just as they thought they would never reach,
just as the final bolt of her door was shot, the tip of each forefinger touched and, in the briefest of contacts, a world
went back and forth.

‘It is time.’ The voice of a gaoler clamoured, loud, monstrous. Fingers parted, a chair shrieked back. There was a flash of
gathered green silk –
Green again. Hadn’t he warned her? –
and she was gone. They left the door open as they took her out, and Jack sat and continued to stare into the air that had
lately held her, staying there, staring there, as the world outside returned in sound.

The drum had started again, a single trump now, and the crowd listened to it in silence until a door was flung open. Then
they roared once, and immediately fell near quiet again, only murmuring, seeing the whole of what Jack had just seen only
a part – Louisa Reardon, dressed in simple perfection, in defiant green, walking, a few feet below him, from the prison door
that opened directly on to the scaffold.

He could sit no more, was up, moving back and forth, wall to wall. He had sworn to Burgoyne to see Diomedes dead and that
was another oath broken. Yet he would hear her die and suddenly that seemed so much worse. He thought of trying to block his
ears, for each noise, however small, came up to echo round his cell. But as soon as he reached up his hands, he forced them
down again. For she was still alive in this world, a few feet below him and his only link to her was … sound. Of her feet,
shod in her finest, that determined walk he had heard a lifetime before on the deck of a ship when she’d come to fetch him
to supper. The feet stopping, her voice then, crying out, as firm as her step, ‘God bless the Revolution!’ Answering cries
from a few in the crowd, silence returning … till the sound came of a hood being twisted over a head, a struggle as all that
hair was shoved in. Sound of hands being tied, of a rope dropping from a crossbar, settling, creaking slightly in the light
wind. Silence again, just for a moment, till the clock on the square began to toll, Jack crossing the room with the first
stroke, crossing back on the next, running now, touching the wall, throwing
himself to touch it, pushing away, back and forth on every note.

It stopped. He stopped. And the next sounds came. Something falling through air, breath inhaled, his own, a thousand others;
the snap of rope; then just the creaking of noose and bar as both took the weight and Jack’s howl lost among the many, as
if he were now standing outside or they were all in there with him. He fell then, on to the cot, off it, on to the floor.
Darkness had come over his eyes, his hands flailed around him, smashed into walls, seemed to touch nothing. The one sense
left was still his hearing, though that was now distorted, magnified, selective. Filled only with the creak of rope, the settling
of timber, a breeze moving silk.

They let her sway there till the clock again struck the quarter. Then new noises came, of something heavy dropping to grunts,
another gasp, more cheers, of men moving below, nails screaming as they were withdrawn from holes, hefty beams of wood being
knocked down. Jack knew, despite the numbness that had taken his limbs and mind where he lay on the floor, that a scene change
was under way. It was time for the final act of the play, its climax. He used the cot to raise himself, stood and began to
dust the cell’s leavings from his Redcoat and breeches.

When they led him on to the same scaffold, out into the grey light, he saw that he had been correct, for the simple square
frame of the gallows had been disassembled, its three beams laid out one atop the other to his left, the rope carefully coiled
and placed at one end. Of Louisa’s body there was no sign. André had said that once her prisoner-father had been found, he
would be released on grounds of compassion from the Convention Army. She would be kept for him to claim, to bury her, no doubt,
in the valley of her childhood.

As the drum struck up again, as he was led to place his back against the scarred brickwork of the gaol – it had obviously
been used for this purpose before – he looked around him, taking in everything, feeling nothing. Directly ahead, under louring
snow clouds, what should be the fourth side of the square was open to the Delaware River, steps leading down to wharfs. These
supplied the shops and warehouses lining the other two sides, split only by single archways that led out to surrounding streets.
Each building had an arch, and he presumed there was one in the base of the gaol too.

He looked up. To both his left and right, balconies overhung the square and these were filled with the more fashionable of
society, like boxes at Drury Lane. Indeed, it was as fine a theatre as ever he’d seen, the floor of the square the pit, the
boxes above. The stage entrances were stairs off the sides of the platform. As he looked, a file of soldiers began to climb
the ones to the right, moving to the steady beat of the drum. At their head was Banastre Tarleton.

The file halted on one command, on another became a line facing Jack.

‘Rest your firelocks!’ Tarleton bawled, and while the ten men obeyed, their officer wheeled and walked towards him. He nodded
at the two men who had led Jack to the wall. Instantly, they let go his arms and moved away down the stairs.

The drum had ceased and the chatter had started again in the crowd. Tarleton had to more than whisper to be heard. ‘Last blood,
eh, Absolute?’

Jack, who had avoided meeting his gaze, did so now. He thought of all the wonderful sentences he could speak, full of bravado,
how he would write this scene for the stage. Sheridan would have done well with it, though his bent was more towards comedy.
There was a time when Jack might
have appreciated the irony – about to be executed by his own army. When he’d lain in that log at Saratoga and considered all
the ways he’d nearly died, could yet die, he had not considered that one. When in the forest he’d contemplated all the titles
he had acquired, he had never imagined that traitor would be the one by which he would be best remembered. But humour had
disappeared from the world. Louisa was dead and she had taken all the smiles away.

Tarleton expected the words, waited for the defiance. When none came, even he was somehow discomfited. Pulling a scarf from
his pocket, he reached up to tie it around Jack’s eyes.

‘No.’ It was the only word he would give him. Tarleton stared at him for a moment, then shoved the scarf away. ‘Good,’ he
said, his momentary unease gone, ‘for now you’ll be able to see all your friends.’ He pointed to the balcony on the right.
There, sat just behind General Howe, was John André. Beside him was the Count von Schlaben.

Jack looked away, but not before he’d seen the German incline his head in acknowledgement, in triumph. It didn’t matter. There
was no way to convey in a look how little Jack cared.

Tarleton had walked back to his soldiers. He stopped, facing out to the crowd, took off his hat, and yelled, ‘Behold the fate
reserved for all traitors! God save the King!’ To cheers, he turned back and on his signal, the drum began to sound.

‘Raise your firelocks!’ Tarleton cried.

Jack looked up into the sky above the river.

‘Cock your firelocks!’

A bird flew there. It was a heron, making its ungainly way along. It made him think of that night in the forest, the one that
he and Louisa had watched there. Of the other one he’d seen on the battlefield, just before Simon Fraser was shot.

‘Present your firelocks!’

A strange thing happened. The heron suddenly plunged down to the far bank. Then he saw why, that another heron floated in
some rushes there. The two birds now flapped together, water rising around them, reed-thin necks craning to each other.

Fighting or making love?
Jack wondered. It didn’t matter. It was just good to see something new, in the moment before he died.

Tarleton had paused, signalled the drum to cease, was staring at Jack intently as if he wanted to fix him for ever in his
mind’s eye, this enemy conquered. And in the pause, in the silence, a second strange thing happened.

An explosion came, but not of muskets. Muskets could not cause the timbers of the scaffold to be rent suddenly upwards, to
bend and splinter and splay around a hole that smoke poured from, sucking three soldiers into it. Tarleton tumbled the other
way, shiny boots flailing as he flew down into the crowd, as ungainly as any heron. Jack was flung against the wall, hit it
hard, slid to the timber flooring.

‘Rebels!’ came the cry, among the screams, as it had at the theatre only the week before. But Jack was perhaps the first to
realize that this was not true when a head thrust through the smoking hole. For it had both a scalp lock on the crown and
a face he knew well.

‘Come, Daganoweda,’ said Até, hoisting himself half-through the gap, reaching out an arm. ‘Come.’

He felt he could not move, his body still shaking from the sudden explosion. Até leaned further forward, grabbing and snagging
one of Jack’s feet. The pulling motion was enough and Jack now scrambled to the hole. His friend dropped away and he peered
down, into a chamber filled with smoke; Até stood there with six other warriors.

Iroquois. Mohawk. Wolf.

Heavy boots were thumping towards him on the platform. Orders were being shouted, someone was taking command. There was no
time to do anything but sink into the smoky space, so he did. Até and others reached up to break his fall, set him on his
feet, propelled him back towards the archway under the gaol house, past two fusiliers unconscious on the ground. The arch
gave on to a passage, then out on to the street beyond. Philadelphians, those who had chosen not to attend the executions,
stared as they all emerged, trailing smoke. Immediately, Até and the others of his clan began to run to the left, parallel
to the back wall of the gaol, helping him whenever he stumbled. They turned at the corner, ran down the side of the building
towards the river, dodging around the townsfolk and soldiers fleeing the shock of the square. Someone shouted at them to stop;
they ran on.

‘Here!’ Até pulled him right, away from the steps, through a screen of rushes. Suddenly there was ice under their feet, panes
of it cracking as they went over. Then there was the shock of water, freezing water, splashing over his boot tops. Two more
Mohawk appeared, pushing two canoes. The others got aboard, dragging him in after. Seizing paddles, fast strokes took them
swiftly into the centre of the stream.