Chapter FourteenTHE YOUNG MAY DIE
Kittydid not know what time it was or how long she had been asleep. She only knew that she was wide awake now, somewhere in the empty black middle of the night, and she could hear Gran’s voice from the taproom below.
“You may be an officer, young man,” Gran was saying, “furthermore, you may have come all the way up here from Connecticut, but I’m not impressed with that. I’m not one of your soldiery, nor obliged to take your orders. This is my son-in-law’s house, and the taxes upon it paid. I mean to stay here till he orders me from it.”
Kitty leaped out of bed and ran to the head of the stairs where she could hear better.
“It’s only for your own safety, Ma’am,” a harassed young voice was explaining. “There’s going to be all hell to pay here tomorrow morning.”
“So you’ve been telling me,” went on Gran calmly, “and in that case, I’d better get some sleep to be ready for it. Good night, young man.”
Kitty heard the slamming of the front door. She crept downstairs.
Gran was methodically taking all the best silverware out of the chest and wrapping each piece separately in flannel.
“What’s the matter, Gran?” asked Kitty. She drew her flimsy nightrail around her and stood there shivering.
Gran went on sorting out porringers and teaspoons. “There’s going to be trouble, child,” she said. “The town’s full of soldiers, and there’s more soldiers digging some sort of burrow above us on the hill. They say by daylight we can expect shooting.”
“Are they British soldiers?” asked Kitty. After all, Gerry Malory had warned her, and she had passed the message on, telling Gran it was something she had heard in the street. Gran had scoffed at the idea, refused to be driven away.
“British! No! They be still drinking and gambling in Boston, and like to stay there till the blast of Gabriel’s horn, if you ask me. These soldiers are our own lads, and they sent the word about that since they’ve entrenched themselves on a hill the British wanted, they look for a battle.”
“If—if there is a battle, what will we do?” asked Kitty.
“We’ll do what is needed,” said Gran shortly. “Right now I want you to wake Sally Rose. Put on your oldest dresses and good stout shoes. No flounces and toothpick heels, mind. Pick up whatever valuables you have and bring them to me.”
Sally Rose, still sleepy-eyed, was enchanted at the prospect of adventure. She brought a whole little chest full of trinkets when they returned to the kitchen. Kitty had only her mother’s cameo brooch, and she pinned that inside her bodice. Gran held out a willow basket full of the carefully wrapped silver.
“You girls take this down to the graveyard and bury it,” she ordered. “If the British come pouring in here tomorrow morning, looking for what they can find, new-turned earth in a graveyard will occasion no comment.” Across the lid of the basket she laid a wooden shovel.
Carrying the basket between them, the girls picked their way through the town in the warm, dim starlight. Here and there they passed by little groups of men who seemed to be patrolling the streets, who looked at them curiously but uttered no challenge. Lights were burning across the river in Boston and on the masts of theSomersetlying at anchor in mid-channel. Cries of “All’s Well!” sounded faintly at intervals from its decks and from the sentries in the town beyond it.
There were no lights or sentries apparent on Bunker Hill, nor yet on Breed’s, when they looked that way, but both hillsides seemed to be alive with moving masses of shadow; a low hum rose above them like the swarming of many hives of bees. Now and then there was a tiny flash of light, or a clang as a shovel hit against stone.
Kitty dug a shallow pit under the flowering quince tree where she had talked with Gerry Malory, and Sally Rose helped to cover it over, once the silver and her own treasures lay safe inside. Then they hurried back to the Bay and Beagle. Gran was trotting about the kitchen, setting many pans of bread to rise, pulling down hams from the rafters, heating the bake ovens red hot.
“Get to work, girls,” she said as they came in, handing Kitty a carving knife and Sally Rose a wooden spoon. “Can’t tell how many men we may have to feed tomorrow.”
When they finished the preparations she considered necessary, they sank down exhausted on benches drawn to the oak table. Kitty noticed that the hands of the tall old clock pointed to a quarter past three.
“My soul and body,” said Gran, “I thought I’d learned to do without it, but a cup of tea would certainly taste good to me right now.”
Sally Rose smiled and her eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “I can get you tea, Gran,” she said. “Father has some hiddenaway. He says he keeps it for times of need among womenfolk. ’Twas bought long ago before tea-tax time. Put the kettle on, Kitty.”
She went flying into the taproom to the secret cache behind the bar. A little later they sat down again with steaming cups before them.
But Gran’s face was sober, and she spoke more gently than was her wont to do. “I hope that whatever happens tomorrow,” she said, holding her teacup in her hand, not tasting the fragrant liquid, “you girls will behave in a fitting manner, though it may not be easy. There is bound to be much danger about in a battle, and many horrible sights to be seen. When the soldiers came here first and warned us to go away, I thought I would do as they advised me. And then I remembered an old great-grandmother of mine. She lived in a lonely garrison and when the Indians attacked her home, she did not run away.”
“What did she do?” asked Sally Rose, her eyes wide.
“She poured boiling water out of an upstairs window and scalded the varmints,” snapped Gran, with all her usual severity. “And if she could do that, it came to me that I could stay here and do whatever it was needful I should do.”
“Do you think to pour hot water on the British, Gran?” asked Kitty, trying to suppress a giggle.
“Times change,” said Gran, her eyes fixed on the dwindling darkness outside, on the tall hollyhock stems becoming visible in the garden, “and that’s not what will be expected of us, most likely. Only—it comes to me—that sometime, a good many years from now, all of us, yes, even you, Sally Rose, will be great-grandmothers, too.”
“With gray hair?” asked Sally Rose plaintively.
“With gray hair—or no hair at all,” continued Gran. “And then, at that time, we wouldn’t want the young folk ofour blood to say we were afraid and ran away when the time of danger came.”
She looked challengingly at the girls.
“No,” said Kitty soberly. “We wouldn’t want that. But what will we do, Gran?”
“Can’t tell for certain. But the way I see it, we keep a victualling house, and when there’s a lull in the fight, if a fight there be, the men will want food and drink. We’ll be here to provide it for them. All we have to do is the thing we do every day—”
A low boom like thunder, and yet sharper and more explosive than thunder, rolled and echoed in the direction of Morton’s Point. A moment later the windows rattled and the tavern shook.
Gran covered her ears and closed her eyes. “Merciful heavens, it’s begun! I’ll have to eat my fine words now! Under the table, Kitty, Sally Rose!”
In a moment they were huddled together on the floor, with the spreading trestles round them and the stout oak planks above. The blast was followed by a silence, and in the silence they heard a derisive shouting from the crest of Breed’s Hill.
“Sounds like the lads up there had suffered no harm from it,” murmured Gran, her voice a little steadier now. “That was a cannon shot, I think; most likely from one of their ships. I really doubt they’ll come ashore. Perhaps it would be safe—”
The cannon boomed again. Now another cannon spoke out, a little to the left. Then another. There were no silences any more, only the steady booming, and with every fourth or fifth boom, the tavern shook. One after another the windowpanes began to shatter. Once they heard a great crash in the street.
They did not speak to each other, for no human voice could penetrate the din. Kitty watched a streak of sunlightslowly widen and move across the floor. It told her that time was passing, and that this was a clear, bright day.
After awhile a lull did come, and the cannonading died out into silence. The silence was broken by a heavy knocking on the street door.
Gran’s eyes snapped and her face hardened. “’Pon my soul, no stranger is going to catch me hiding under a table, cannon or no cannon—nor my granddaughters, either. Kitty, go and see what’s wanted.”
She got to her feet and smoothed her apron. Sally Rose followed her and stood still, her eyes wide with fright, her lips trembling. Kitty went to open the door.
A gnarled old man stood there, holding a wooden bucket in each hand. He pointed to the tavern sign and then opened his mouth in a toothless grin.
“Lass,” he inquired, “are ye doing business today?”
“Yes,” said Kitty steadily. “I guess we are.”
“Good. Will ye fill these pails with water for me. The lads has need of it on the Hill.”
“Come in,” said Kitty. She took the two pails through the kitchen to the garden well. When she returned with them, there were half a dozen other men waiting, and they wanted water, too.
The guns began again with a new fury. Gran and Sally Rose had stepped into the garden, and when Kitty returned there after the men had gone, she found them staring up the hill.
A small, square earthworks stood on the green crest that had been bare at twilight. Small figures of men were working all around it, digging up turf, building it higher, stringing a wooden fence in front. Other men passed to and fro over Bunker Hill and the highroad that led to the Neck. Every now and then a column of dust shot skyward as a cannon ballplowed into the earth. But the men who were busy about the earthworks paid no attention to the cannon balls.
Now and then there would be a moment’s pause in the firing, and that gave Gran and the girls a chance to speak to one another.
“What’s going on up there, and where are the British?” demanded Gran. “Did those water boys bring you any news, Kitty?”
“It’s just as you thought,” said Kitty hurriedly, knowing that the guns might interrupt her at any moment. “The ships are firing at us from all three sides. The lookouts say there’s a commotion in Boston, but it’s too early to tell yet what they mean to do. They say there are about a hundred people left here in the town, but there’s such heavy firing across the Neck they doubt that we can get away.”
Just then there came a hail from the kitchen doorway, where a man stood with two empty water buckets. Gran went to talk with him herself, this time. When he had gone, she spoke her mind to the girls.
“Nobody up there’s got time to be hungry, it seems, and they’ve plenty of strong drink amongst them, but two of their great hogsheads have been shot open, and the need’s for water. Sally Rose, you stay by the windlass and keep turning. Kitty, you carry the pails to the taproom to save the men the journey out here. Fill every tub and bucket and keep them full. I’m going to the roof to see for myself whatever there is to be seen.”
It seemed to the two girls that the morning would last forever, as the sun toiled upward toward noon. Sally Rose ground at the windlass and swung the heavy buckets over the stone curb where Kitty’s hand received them and carried them inside. Round and round, back and forth, round and round, less like women of flesh and blood than like two parts of some wooden machine. They did not talk much together.They had not the breath for it, nor very much to say. Now and then Kitty looked up the hill to the earthworks, the tiny, gallant redoubt. The men were still toiling to reinforce it, and a man in a blue coat strolled fearlessly along the parapet as if he were telling them what to do.
It was about noon by the kitchen clock when Gran came down stairs. Her face was grim. “Girls,” she said tensely, “leave your work and come with me. I want you to see a shameful sight. I want you to see the King’s soldiers coming out with guns against the King’s loyal people.”
The Bay and Beagle was a square-built house of red brick, three stories tall, with a white railing about its flat roof. Gran led the girls to the side facing Boston, half a mile away. Kitty gripped the rail with both hands, though she would have liked to put them in her ears, the cannonading had become so much louder, the spaces between the blasts so brief and few. Sunlight sparkled on the blue river and on the three great ships pouring forth constant broadsides of fire. Flames leaped forth from Copp’s Hill, from floating batteries in the ferry way, and over all hung a mist of grayish white smoke.
“Look there,” hissed Gran during a quiet interval, quiet except for the jangling bells of Boston that were doing their best to make their steeples rock.
Kitty and Sally Rose let their glances follow her pointing finger, to the docks that lined the opposite shore. Two lines of barges were moving out on the full tide, one from Long Wharf, and one from the North Battery. They rode low in the water, being full to the gunwhales with soldiers clad in white and vivid scarlet. The sunlight gleamed on the steel of bayonets, on the brass mountings of the great black guns. It was a gorgeous and yet a terrible sight.
All Boston seemed to go mad with the frantic clamor of bells. Shouts and cheers rose from its crooked streets that wandered up hill and down, and somewhere a band was playing.Its rooftops were black with tiny figures who had climbed there to watch the King’s troops move against the King’s people who felt they had always been loyal to him—so far.
When the two rows of barges reached midstream they drew near to each other and then moved forward in two long lines, side by side, like pairs of marching men. They seemed to be headed for Moulton’s Point. Kitty watched them till they passed out of sight around a curve of the shore. Then she turned to face Gran and Sally Rose.
“Do—do you think they’re going to land?” she asked.
“Sakes alive, child,” answered Gran, “I don’t know what they mean to do, but we’ll go back downstairs and see if we can find out. There are sure to be more men coming after water.” She glanced up the hill toward the redoubt. Only a few figures moved about it now, but clouds of dust rose everywhere, thrown up by the impact of cannon balls, and the smoke from the guns themselves drifted that way. At that moment a handful of men appeared on the top of Bunker Hill, coming from the direction of the Neck. More men followed them, and still more. In orderly fashion they marched toward the redoubt where they were greeted with a faint cheering.
“Looks like more of our lads had come to help,” said Gran, as she led them down the narrow stairs and into the taproom. Just as she had suspected, three water carriers waited there, and all the pails and tubs were empty.
“Gran,” whispered Sally Rose, “I—I just don’t think I can turn that windlass any more.”
Gran looked at her keenly. “It makes the arms ache, I know,” she said with surprising sympathy. “Kitty, you go to the well for a while, and let Sally Rose carry the buckets.”
And thus their morning chores began all over again, though it was already early afternoon.
At the end of her third trip between well and taproom,Sally Rose stopped to talk to Kitty in one of the rare intervals when no gun was going off.
“Kit,” she said wanly, “I—I’m frightened, Kit. Do you think Gerry’s coming in one of those barges? Do you think he’ll have to shoot at our lads on the Hill? Do you think he might shoot at me?”
Kitty had been wondering almost the same thing, but she would not tell her cousin so.
“If you’re going to think about a lad at a time like this,” she said, “why don’t you think of Johnny? You’ve gone about with Johnny for a long time, Sally Rose, and Johnny’s on our side. Don’t you wonder if maybe he isn’t up there—in that earthworks on the Hill? Right there in the thick of the cannon balls?”
“Well, I do wonder about Johnny,” she answered plaintively, “and about Dick, even about that New Hampshire boy with no manners—Tom what’s his name.”
Kitty, too, had wondered about Tom, but not too much. There was a cold certainty in her heart that Tom Trask would be in the thick of whatever fighting there was to come. She knew that as well as if she could see him there.
“Girls!” called Gran’s voice from the kitchen door. “Girls! come here to me!”
Kitty let go the windlass suddenly, and the handle spun creaking round. Sally Rose set down her pail.
Just then there was a loud whine somewhere overhead, and then a whoosh, a shower of splinters about them, and a roaring wind that flung them hard against the turf. For a moment they lay there, not daring to move. The smell of burning powder filled the air. Then another roaring wind went by, but not so close, and higher overhead.
Kitty sat up. A cannon ball was bouncing across the grassy yard of the house next door. It had passed through the garden and shattered the pointed roof of the well-house wherethey stood. She reached out and grasped Sally Rose by the shoulder.
“Quick,” she gasped. “Let’s get inside. They’re firing into the town, not just at the earthworks any more.”
Racing into the taproom, they found Gran in talk with a tall man who wore an officer’s coat and three-cornered hat and did not carry a pail.
“Girls,” said Gran, her voice frighteningly calm, “the British have landed, and ’tis plain they mean to charge the Hill. Whether they can take it or not, we don’t know. But they’re shooting straight into Charlestown now, iron balls and iron cases full of burning trash. The town’ll soon be in flames over our heads. ’Tis time to leave. There’s nothing more we can do.”
A moment later they were in the street outside, trailing along after a sorry-looking group of men and women, poor folk, mostly, who had stayed in town in spite of all the warnings of danger, because they had nowhere else to go.
“I’m glad,” murmured Gran as they plodded over the cobblestones, their eyelids smarting and their throats choked with the thick smokiness that seemed to be flooding over the whole world, “I’m glad we sent Timothy to Cambridge, two days back—Timothy and that poor horse, too. At least, we’re leaving no living thing behind to burn.”
Kitty thought of all the living things who were left to their fate in that tiny fortress on the Hill.
Iron shot blasted the roofs about them, and balls of living flame burst in the street. All along their way the old wooden houses were beginning to catch fire. Just as they passed out of town and into the green country at the rear of Bunker Hill, Kitty looked back. Clouds of black smoke billowed upward from the docks, the warehouses, the dwellings, the shops in the market square. The church steeple lifted up one soaring pyramid of fire.
Her eyes hurt suddenly with tears that did not come from the smoke.
“Come away, child,” said Gran, putting her arm about the girl’s shoulders, using her other hand to guide the half-blinded Sally Rose.
How far they had gone before the little procession came to a halt, she did not know, but she did know they toiled a long way down the dusty road, constantly shelled by the heavy guns of the ships.
When they did stop, it was in the front dooryard of a little tavern, The Sign of the Sun. The raggle-taggle company scattered themselves about on the grass, but Gran led the girls inside.
“They say the firing’s too heavy for us to cross the Neck and flee inland,” she explained, “but ’tis to this place they are bringing the wounded men. Perhaps we can help here.”
The taproom they entered was not unlike the taproom at the Bay and Beagle, but tables and benches had been moved back to clear the floor. Some dozen men in tattered shirts and bloody breeches were lying on the wide pine boards. Some moaned, and some lay very still. Three women worked among them, and a man in a buff coat, a doctor, most like, knelt by one soldier probing a wounded knee.
Gran looked around her. “There’s water and bandages on the counter over there,” she said. “Get to work, Kitty, Sally Rose.”
If the morning had seemed long, it seemed that that afternoon at the Sign of the Sun would never go. Kitty knelt and swabbed and tied bandages and held whiskey to men’s lips to ease their pain when Dr. Eustis’ probe went deep. Sally Rose and Gran were doing the same thing, too.
Then the men came in so fast there was no room for them in the tavern, so they were laid in the yard, and all about thegarden reaching up the hill. The air was full of booming sound and smoke, and over all burned the hot, hot sun.
The British had charged the Hill and been driven back, she heard from the men she tended. The British had gathered themselves together and were about to charge again.
She and Gran and Sally Rose were working over two men with shoulder wounds, trying to staunch the flow of blood, when Gran suddenly stood up and put her hand to her forehead. A strange look came across her face. Then she smiled, and the light in her eyes paled out and dimmed away.
“The young may die,” she murmured, “but the old must.”
She tottered and fell beside the soldiers on the bloody grass.
“Dead. Stone dead,” muttered Dr. Eustis, kneeling above her a few moments later. “Her heart failed from the shock and strain of this day, I do believe. But she died with her hand to the plow. She died like a good soldier.”
Sally Rose crouched on the steps of the tavern, put her head in her lap, and burst into uncontrollable weeping. She never moved from there the rest of the afternoon. After Gran’s body was carried to a chamber over the taproom, Kitty looked desolately about her for a few moments. Then she went back to tending the wounded men. She would do what it was needful for her to do.
Word came down the hill that the British were driving on the redoubt, that powder horns were getting low.
Sometime after that—she never knew how long—Kitty knelt beside the newest soldier to arrive. His head was bloody, and he wore a rough shirt and breeches like all the rest, but on his feet were the fine polished boots worn by the men in the British Army. When she washed the blood away, she found she was bending over Gerry Malory.