The Turning of Anne Merrick (34 page)

These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it
now,
deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

T
HOMAS
P
AINE
,
The American Crisis

J
ANUARY 1778
O
N THE
G
ULPH
R
OAD IN
P
ENNSYLVANIA

“What a pretty snow!”

Big, buoyant flakes floated on the frigid air, much like loose down from a burst featherbed. Slouched inside a cocoon of woolen garments, Anne swayed with the motion of the mule-drawn wagon in time to the creak and turn of the wheels. She pulled down the muffler tied over nose and mouth and, with a giggle, caught a single snowflake with the tip of her tongue.

Jack laughed and pulled at his muffler, trying to catch some snow in similar fashion without any success. Anne brushed away the fluffy flakes that clung to his black mustache and beard like burrs on a hound dog. “Best cover up, or your beard will be ice again.”

“Don’t fret for my beard.” Jack pointed ahead. “See those hills rising up at the crest of the road? Valley Forge and the promise of a warm fire lay just beyond…”

A crash of musket fire cut through the peace of the snowfall, the discordant echo ringing as lead shot pinged off the iron-banded wheels
on their wagon. “What the… ?” Jack twisted around, trying hard to maintain control over the agitated mule team and see beyond the hooped canvas cover protecting their cargo.

Holding tight to the edge of her seat, Anne leaned out as far as she could to see a company of red-jacketed horsemen with sabers drawn, closing in at full gallop—long madder-dyed horsehair tails snapping from the top of their leather helmets like pennants in the wind.

“Dragoons!”

“Goddamn it!” Jack tossed the reins into Anne’s lap and tugged one of the pistols from his belt.

Anne shouted,
“HYAH!”
sending their two-mule team into a full-on gallop with a hard smack of leather.

Spinning around in his seat, Jack made his way to the very back of the wagon bed in a lurching half crawl, half bumble over the load of crates, barrels, and meal sacks, tearing down the canvas cover as he went.

With the cover down, Anne could see Sally right behind in the second wagon, the hood of her cloak flung back, red braids flying, as she urged her team to speed while Titus with his stubby blunderbuss slung over his back struggled to get to the rear. Anne shouted over the rumble of wheels and jangling harness chains. “Mind you don’t shoot Sally or Titus!”

“Mind your driving!” Jack shouted back. Situated in a semi-crouch with legs acting as springs to absorb the bumps and jerks as the wagon clattered across the frozen, rutted road, he tugged a few meal sacks into a pile. Dropping down behind this rough cover, he used it to prop and steady his aim as best he could in the bouncing wagon. Anne steered the mules around a bend in the road, giving Jack a clear shot at the pursuers. He fired, shouted, “Blast!” and ducked down immediately to reload, pouring powder and ramming shot down the barrel of his weapon. “Ride’s too rough—target’s too swift.”

Titus’s blunderbuss boomed. Jack whooped and yelled, “The blunderbuss knocked Titus back on his arse, but knocked a Redcoat onto his as well!”

Soon a riderless horse came bounding off the road to their left, racing—wild-eyed, mane, reins, and tail flying—surpassing them all.

Titus bellowed,
“Down!”
and another shot rang out. One of the dragoons managed to fire his pistol on the run, sending a flurry of shot thunking into wagon boards and whistling overhead—one buzzed past Anne’s ear like an annoying fly.

Jack popped up, shouting, “You all right, Annie?” as he fired off another shot.

Anne rose up to her feet and encouraged her mules with another
“Hyah!”
and a snap of the reins. “I think I can see the Continental earthworks.”

“I hope our fellows can see us…” Jack tossed his spent gun and tugged the other pistol from his belt. “Those dragoons are relentless—and they’re closing in.”

As if in answer to Jack’s wish, rifle fire flashed along the line of Patriot entrenchments like a lit string of crackers, the welcome noise crisp in the cold air. Jack clambered back over the cargo and regained his seat beside Anne. “Let’s test their mettle in range of Patriot sharpshooters.”

Anne handed over the reins, and checked over her shoulder. “The dragoons are drawing to a halt—”

Titus whistled and shook his fist in the air, and Sally screamed, “Huzzah!”

With much relief, Anne watched the Redcoats growing smaller and smaller, until, with a swing of his saber, the dragoon captain wheeled his company around, and they headed back to the British winter camp in Philadelphia.

The two wagons careened through the opening in the hills, following the road into a wooded valley. “Whoa!” Jack tugged on the reins, easing his team into a canter. He and Anne waved and shouted, “Halloo!” to the sentries manning the fortifications, and the soldiers whistled and cheered with guns raised overhead as the wagons passed by. The mules slowed, their lathered sides heaving and great puffs of steam spewing from their noses. Anne turned in her seat and shouted to Sally, “Are you all right?”

“I’m nothin’ but grand since those dragoons turned arse about,” she replied. “But poor Titus lost his hat to the wind…”

“
Not the Canadian one with the fur?”

Sitting beside Sally with his muffler tied over his ears, Titus nodded and called, “I’ll go back later and see if I can find it.”

Anne secured the woolly muffler she used to keep her felt hat from blowing away, tucking the free ends down the front of the Brunswicker coat she wore. She stuffed each gloved hand up the opposite sleeve, forming a makeshift muff of the big cuffs. Not given the time to alter the too-long sleeves and too-wide girth, Anne had not relished wearing one of the heavy officer’s coats Titus had scavenged for her and Sally back in Stillwater. But in traveling the miles from Albany to Valley Forge by river and road in the dead of winter, she’d grown to appreciate the volume and quality of the dense German wool. With a combination of wool and flannel layers beneath the coat, hot bricks at feet, and hooded cloak thrown over all, the women weathered the worst of the journey bundled in good comfort.

As the wagons passed deeper into the Patriot army encampment, the rolling landscape flanking the Gulph Road became crowded with hundreds and hundreds of little log cabins. Like the buttons on a general’s coat, the cabins were situated in neat rows.

The woodsmoke tumbling from the multitude of mud and timber chimneys hovered between the earth and the cloud-heavy sky, stinging her eyes. Anne swiped at tears, shifting around in her seat, looking in all directions. “It feels like it will storm soon. Everyone must be hunkered in.” Washington’s winter quarters housed more than eleven thousand soldiers and officers, but there were not many within sight. The American camp seemed almost deserted.

Jack slowed the mules to a trot, and the new pace matched the slow motion of the odd world they’d entered. Up ahead, situated amid a legion of tree stumps, they could see a few bundled figures huddled around a large fire and a steaming cauldron.

Anne sniffed the air, crinkling her nose. “Soap making.”

A few men in shirtsleeves filtered out of doorways, waving and shouting greetings. Anne and Jack waved back. They passed by cluster after cluster of the little log cabins, the mule hoofbeats plodding to a steady metronome of ax steel biting into wood—the noise of construction—the
thwack, thwack, thwack
resounding from either side of the road. One ax was halted by shouts, and followed by the distinct popping, crackling, and crash of the tree falling somewhere in the distant woods to their left. Anne could only imagine how many trees were felled to build this miniature city in a wilderness where practically nothing had existed the month before.

Jack pulled his team to a halt, giving way to a man tugging a heavy sled loaded with deadfall across the rutted road. Once across, the man stopped in the knee-deep snow to catch his breath, and Jack urged the mules forward with a double click of his tongue.

Anne could not help but stare. Bandaged against the cold, the man’s face was wound in strips of wool torn from a dingy blanket, leaving nothing but his eyes exposed to the icy wind. The rest of his costume was a raggedy puzzle of parts and pieces that even the poorest beggar on the meanest street in New York would be shamed to wear. This tatterdemalion wore a flannel nightshirt beneath a frazzled-edged jacket cut from blanket wool, the pieces of which were sewn together with thick, coarse thread in stitches big enough for Anne to see at a distance of ten paces. Rather than britches, he wore loose trousers patched together from tent canvas of varying hues, and the entire ensemble was topped off with a tasseled nightcap pulled down low to cover his ears.

The man pulled aside the scraps of wool tied over his mouth and nose, and called out, “Got any shoes in them wagons?”

“No shoes,” Jack answered. “Meal, beans, salt pork, and blankets.”

“All good, and we are grateful for it, but what you brung there is but a fart in a gale wind, mister. We’ve no meat. No shoes. No clothes. No pay. Naught here but fire cake to eat and misery aplenty.” The soldier grasped the leather harness strapped over his shoulders with hands chapped pink and raw and renewed his trek.

Jack called, “Wait!” He reached back into the wagon bed and tugged a blanket free from one of the bales, and tossed it over. “Take this, friend. Come find me and I’ll make certain you get a fair share of what we brought.”

“I
will
find you, mister. Thank you—thank you, kindly.” He twirled
the gift over head and shoulders. As he trudged away, they could see his feet stepping in and out of the snow were shoeless and bound in a few filthy strips of wool.

Jack snapped the reins, the muscles in his jaw set tight. “It’s a crooked and fretful country that treats its fighting men with such disregard.”

They passed the army’s artillery park—piles of shot and shells alongside rows of cannon foundered in the deep snow. Anne eyed one of many odd hummocks dotting the open flats along the roadside near the artillery park. The wind had swept the snow away from one to reveal a fuzzy dark patch—an equine head. Her brow furrowed. “Horses?”

“Dead horses…” Jack said.

The small convoy approached a long man-made tangle of tree limbs and branches pinioned to the ground in front of a long trench. The abatis stretched out from either side of the road, and there were more cabins laid out in neat avenues beyond the obstacles, a few yet incomplete. At the farthest end of the Gulph Road, a two-story stone house stood with its back to the junction of a small creek and the Schuylkill River.

“The General’s headquarters, Annie!” Sally shouted and clapped her mittened hands. “We’ll find David there.”

They pulled to a halt near the house, drawing onlookers from the nearby cabins. Jack hopped down and helped Anne from her seat. The crowd of curious men gathered around the wagons, most of them in the same sad and ragged condition as the man they’d seen crossing the road. The door of the stone house swung open and a smiling David came running out. Pulling on a heavy overcoat, he waved and shouted, “Sally!”

Before Titus could bring his team to a full stop, Sally squeaked, scrambled down from the wagon seat, and ran into his arms. David swooped her up as if she were no more than a child and swung her around before setting her on her feet to kiss her soundly.

“I missed ye so!” Sally cried.

“Not anywhere near as much as I’ve missed you!” David pulled her
close, but after only a moment’s embrace, he twisted around to sneeze three times into his sleeve.

“Ochone! Look at ye—yiv grown thin as a noodle! Snifflin’ and sneezing…” She stripped off the woolly muffler she wore.

“A bit of catarrh, is all,” he said.

“Once we’re settled in I’ll make you a nice soup.” Winding the muffler around David’s ears and throat, Sally brushed away the snow collecting on his chestnut hair. “See to yer buttons—an’ where’s yer hat gone to?”

“I suppose I left it inside.” David smiled, dutifully buttoning up his coat.

Whisking a hankie from the depths of her sleeve, Sally ordered, “Blow!”

David made use of the handkerchief as directed, then turned to give Anne a hug and shake hands with Jack and Titus. “I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you made it through with the goods in tow. Manna from heaven, you are.” With clear delight he walked around the wagon beds inspecting the cargo, running his hand over the sacks of cornmeal and beans—knocking knuckles to the barrels of salt pork.

“We brought what we could lay hands on, but I see now we should have brought more. No one told us you were suffering such privation,” Jack said, waving his hand to the gathering crowd.

“No one knows—and that is how the General would like to keep it. The British might be tempted from the comfort of their winter quarters if they knew our weak and downtrodden state.”

“They know, David,” Titus said. “We were almost waylaid on the road by a company of dragoons.”

“Waylaid!”

“Dinna fash.” Sally looped her arm through David’s to dispel the worry in his eye. “Fire from yer pickets gave them pause, thanks be, and we managed t’ ride in unmolested.”

“Sergeant Caufield…” David called a soldier over. “See to these animals and place a guard on these stores. Spread the word—a severe flogging will be dealt to anyone suspected of thievery.”

How her brother was able to recognize rank or identity was a mystery to Anne.
The sergeant who stepped forward at David’s command was one of the many desperate onlookers wearing a patchwork of rags nowhere near resembling any kind of uniform.

“What’s going on with this army?” Jack asked. “A soldier we spoke to on the road said he lives on naught but fire cake.”

“He told true. The British passed this way before us, and stripped the landscape clean. Forced to supply two armies, the locals are suffering. Our foragers wander far and wide for victuals, straw for our beds, clothing and shoes, fodder for horses—and they have little success dealing with suppliers who prefer British silver to Continental dollars.” David glanced at the crowd, and lowered his voice. “Though the hills and hollows provide good defense, this is probably not the best choice of sites, but the General wanted to stay close to Philadelphia.”