“And you,” he said evenly to Grey. “Go with them behind the lines. If the Rebels still hold Englishtown, guide them there.”
Grey nodded curtly, lips compressed, and turned to go.
He reached out and caught Grey by the shoulder. The man whipped round, blood in his eye.
“Listen to me,” Jamie said, speaking loudly enough to be sure the Crad-dock boys could hear him. “I revoke your parole.” He fixed Grey’s single-eyed glare with one of his own. “D’ye understand me? When you reach Englishtown, ye’ll surrender yourself to Captain McCorkle.”
Grey’s mouth twitched, but he said nothing and gave the merest nod of acknowledgment before turning away.
Jamie turned, too, running for his waiting companies, but risked a single glance over his shoulder.
Shooing the Craddocks before him, awkward and flapping as a pair of geese bound for market, Grey was headed smartly to the south, toward the American lines—if the concept of “lines” held any meaning in this goddamned battle.
Grey had certainly understood, and despite the present emergency, a weight lifted from Jamie’s heart. With his parole revoked, John Grey was once more a prisoner of war, in the custody of his jailors, officially without freedom of movement. But also without the obligation of honor that would hold him prisoner on his own recognizance. Without parole, his primary duty now was that of any soldier in the hands of his enemy—escape.
“Sir!” Bixby arrived at his shoulder, panting. “There are redcoats—”
“Aye, Mr. Bixby. I hear them. Let’s be having them, then.”
IF IT WEREN’T for the coloring book, I might not have noticed immediately. In third or fourth grade, Brianna had had a coloring book featuring scenes from the American Revolution. Sanitized, suitably romantic scenes: Paul Revere flying through the night on a galloping horse, Washington crossing the Delaware while exhibiting (as Frank pointed out) a lamentable lack of seamanship . . . and a double-paged spread featuring Molly Pitcher, that gallant woman who had carried water to the heat-stricken troops (left-hand page) and then taken her wounded husband’s place to serve his cannon (right-hand page)—at the Battle of Monmouth.
Which, it had dawned on me, was very likely what the battle we were engaged in was going to be called, once anyone got round to naming it. Monmouth Courthouse was only two or three miles from my present location.
I wiped my face once more—this gesture did nothing for the perspiration, which was instantly renewed, but, judging from the state of my three soggy handkerchiefs, was removing a fair amount of dirt from my countenance—and glanced toward the east, where I had been hearing distant cannon fire most of the day. Was she there?
“Well, George Washington certainly is,” I murmured to myself, pouring out a fresh cup of water and returning to my work rinsing out bloody cloths in a bucket of salt water. “Why not Molly Pitcher?”
It had been a complicated picture to color, and as Bree had just got to the phase where she insisted that things be colored “real,” the cannon could not be pink or orange, and Frank had obligingly drawn several crude cannon on a sheet of paper and tried out everything from gray (with shadings of black, blue, blue-violet, and even cornflower) to brown, with tints of burnt sienna and gold, before they finally settled—Frank’s opinion as to actual historicity of cannon being diffidently advanced—on black with dark green shadings.
Lacking credentials, I had been relegated to coloring in the grass, though I also got to help with the dramatic shading of Mrs. Pitcher’s raggedly streaming clothes, once Brianna got tired of it. I looked up, the smell of crayons strong in my memory, and saw a small group coming down the road.
There were two Continental regulars—and a man in what I recognized as the light-green uniform of Skinner’s Greens, a Provincial Loyalist regiment. He was stumbling badly, though supported on both sides by the Continentals. The shorter of these also seemed to be wounded; he had a bloodstained scarf wrapped around one arm. The other was looking from side to side as though on guard, but didn’t seem to be wounded.
At first I’d looked at the Provincial, who must be a prisoner. But then I looked more closely at the wounded Continental supporting him. And with Molly Pitcher so clearly and recently in mind, I realized with a small shock that the Continental was a woman. The Continental’s coat covered her hips, but I could plainly see the way in which her legs slanted in toward the knee; a man’s thighbones run straight up and down, but a woman’s width of pelvic basin compels a slightly knock-kneed stance.
It also became clear, by the time they reached me, that the wounded soldiers were related: both were short and thin, with squared-off chins and sloping shoulders. The Provincial was definitely male, though—his face was thickly stubbled—while his . . . sister? They seemed close in age . . . was clear-skinned as an egg and nearly as white.
The Provincial was not. He was red as a blast furnace and nearly as hot to the touch. His eyes were white slits, and his head wobbled on his spindly neck.
“Is he wounded?” I asked sharply, putting a hand under his shoulder to ease him down onto a stool. He went limp the moment his bu**ocks touched it and would have fallen to the ground had I not tightened my grip. The girl gave a frightened gasp and put out a hand toward him, but she also staggered and would have fallen, had the other man not seized her by the shoulders.
“He took a blow to the head,” the male Continental said. “I—hit him with the hilt of my sword.” This admission was made with some embarrassment.