The Glendower Legacy (2 page)

“And you, my man,” one of the Englishmen said sharply, “are in too deep to harbor such a thought! Remember your role in this, if you please.”

“Why try to frighten me? I am well past that … all that frightens me is your treachery. The knife in the dark … I’d almost welcome it, sir, and believe me, I’m hard to kill. I’d get a hand on you, sir, and you’d be dead afore me!”

“Come, come,” a peacemaker said. “This is pointless …”

“Remember, I’m not a joking man,” the American said. “This is serious business.” He paused still without even shifting on his haunches. “Whatever you may think, I am trying to save this land—from defeat, from scoundrels and jackals. You understand me not … my motives are beyond you. We can use each other and I bear it. Only just.”

“You cannot deliver the army,” the peacemaker said. “We realize that … not even—well, no one can deliver an army.”

“The point is, it’s not worth delivering, don’t you see that? That kind of thing would only increase your problems. We must appear to fight to an honorable peace, not quite a surrender, but a peace on your terms—your
generous
terms. Then old King George can sleep soundly again. Not before …”

“Your own sleep will not be exactly troubled …” The harshest of the three Englishmen stood over the squatting figure. “You will be rewarded, as you damned well know—”

“It’s a dice roll. Your word means nothing to me—my reward is to see the country whole again, at peace with the crown … a crown that understands her children …”

“I daresay you will not reject our offerings.” He stalked away toward the trees where William was standing. He stood stock still, watched as the man stopped and wheeled abruptly back toward the fire. William shook with the enormity of what he was witnessing. Treason … somehow, he had to see the crouching man whose shape blotted out the fire. The army and Washington himself were being sold out by this man, this shape without a face whose voice was distorted by the shifting winds in the snowy clearing. He was torn: to get away from this place—but to see the man, the traitor.

“You must sign these papers,” the returning Englishman said. “We must have them as security—”

“Blackmail, that is the word, sir!”

“As you will. You must sign.” He spread the sheets on a campaign stool and drew a writing case from the folds of his greatcoat. The warmth of his body must have kept the ink from freezing. “Your code name—this acknowledges your code name.
Glendower …
Just put the signature on it. You’ve done it before.” He laughed scornfully, placing the ink and pen on the camp stool.

William willed the American to turn around, to reveal himself, though in the shadowy light he might not have been able to make out the features for future identification. In any case, the man remained hunched over.

At precisely that moment, as the pen was being handed back to the argumentative Englishman, the sound of cracking branches and heavy footfalls reached both William Davis and the four men in the clearing. William turned too quickly to see who it might be, tripped over the musket, and fell with a gasp to his knees. The large American turned at the sound of William’s falling and the Englishmen looked off toward his right where the other sounds seemed to be coming from.

A cry came from the new arrivals who crashed and blundered through the trees and underbrush: “Hey! Who is it? Is it you, Harry?” It made no sense to William but the large man, the American, was fumbling in his coat for a pistol which came quickly to view, huge, in his hand. He was pointing it toward William who grabbed his musket, spit out the glove, and struggled to crawl behind a tree. “God damn it! We’re surrounded …” As the American spoke he fired a ball at William who heard it smash into the tree about a foot from his face, splinters flying. The angry flash from the pistol briefly illuminated the man’s face but William was ducking, saw only the pinkness of the face, none of what it signified. He felt his almost empty bladder let loose in his trousers. The man was reloading, coming toward him, but the cries of the newcomers stopped him. Two men broke into the clearing, one of the Englishmen fired point-blank into a face before him and a godawful screech pierced the heavy quiet. The man staggered back, moaning, hands to what had been his face, and fell dead in the snow, his feet jerking. The Englishmen and the traitor fled back across the clearing, kicking the fire to embers in the snow. The soldiers, encumbered by their muskets which weren’t much good at close range, stumbled clumsily after them, shouting. Another pistol shot exploded as the conspirators reached the tree line across the clearing. No one fell and the sounds of several men crashing through the underbrush filled the night. As if by magic the clearing was empty but for the dead Continental.

Reacting instinctively, William darted across the twenty-five feet of open space to the dying campfire and picked up the piece of paper from the stool, felt it catch on a splinter and tear. Afraid to wait he stuffed what he had into his pocket, turned and caught his coat on a sharp edge jutting out from the lean-to. Driven by fear he desperately yanked away, heard his coat rip, and charged back into the covering darkness of the trees. He couldn’t find his musket; he must have missed the exact spot—he heard from the darkness another explosion followed by a strangled cry and a shout, “Over here, over here!” Another explosion cut the voice, separated it from life with awesome abruptness. All of the firing had been from pistols: the Continentals were reduced by three and not a musket had been fired. He didn’t know how many of them there were but going back to look for Harry, whoever he was, had cost them their lives.

Afraid to move, he leaned against a tree feeling his wet trouserfront freeze stiff. He heard no more skirmishing but the sounds growing faint of what he assumed were his comrades—what was left of them—escaping back through the woods. What must they think, he wondered. Three men dead—Christ, what to do? How had the quiet night turned into this? He shook uncontrollably, like a man with a fever.

Were the men he spied on gone for good? He hardly thought so: they’d taken nothing with them when they’d fled. But where were they? He had to wait. He couldn’t face the risk of running into them in the dark; obviously they thought nothing of killing … He couldn’t fall asleep for fear of freezing to death, he couldn’t move for fear of signaling his position. He sat finally, waited. It must have been an hour before he heard them returning from across the clearing. At their first sounds he began his own stealthy departure. He’d vomited on his sleeve. He smelled himself. No musket, a torn coat, a scrap of paper in his pocket, trousers frozen with piss, witness to three murders and high treason …

And the fear had just begun.

The next day William Davis was asked nothing about his lost musket. It was a large encampment intent on surviving, not fighting. He heard rumors about three newly missing men but there was no official announcement, just vague rumors nobody cared much about. There had been no bodies found: William surmised that the three dead men were being written off as deserters, which was precisely what their terrified companions had actually done—deserted, gone home, leaving Valley Forge behind them.

William pondered what to do. Could he tell anyone, without proof? Then he remembered the piece of paper which was still in his trouser pocket. Alone, he peeled it loose and looked at the words, smudged and soiled but still legible. All but the top corner of the sheet had survived. He read it, his Vision hazy from the constant feeling of dizziness, and felt himself go faint, his legs soften.

He couldn’t cope with it. He couldn’t show it to anyone. He couldn’t go to General Washington’s headquarters, he couldn’t take it to Captain Whittaker, he dared not show it to anyone—not until he’d thought it through. Surely, it couldn’t be true … but he’d seen it happen and, by God, now he recognized the shape coming toward him with the drawn pistol. He saw it again and again when he closed his eyes, the featureless face in the flare of the pistol shot.

Befuddled and exhausted, he tied the sheet of paper along with letters from his mother to the back of a framed portrait of her which he kept at the bottom of his small kit bag. He had no place else to hide something. Then he told his bunkmate, John Higgins, to make sure his few personal effects reached his family in Cambridge should he fall victim to the dread dysentery or expire in any other way. Death was everywhere, all around him. He grew depressed as the day wore on, found himself unable to eat. He felt as if a rat were gnawing at his bowels. What was he meant to do with such an unbelievable piece of information?

That night he couldn’t sleep. Past midnight, his guts in an unholy uproar, he wrapped his torn coat around his shivering body, pushed his way past his sleeping mates sprawled here and there in the cabin, went outside coughing from the ever-present smoke. He wiped soot from his eyes, felt the tallow and sulfur congealing on his flesh the moment he left the cabin. It was dark as he paced numbly through the alleyways of frozen, rutted mud and snow toward the latrine. A hard wind took his breath away as he leaned forward. At first he didn’t see the two men who stepped from the shadows into his path.

“Soldier,” one of them said, a soldier he’d noticed walking beside him earlier in the day. “Soldier, stand!” the man said softly. The voice was insistent. The second figure joined him, something fluttering in his outstretched hand.

“What?” William Davis said. “I’ve got to get to the latrine—”

“Tell us, is this yours, soldier?” The second man held out the torn shred of heavy cloth. The brass button caught the light of a torch across the way. “Take a closer look, soldier …”

“It’s mine—I tore my coat. …” He was having trouble focusing his eyes. He hated it but he thought he knew what was happening inside his body: fever, unable to eat, the latrine half a dozen times that day. The significance of the torn coat escaped him until it was too late. He felt the hand clamp like a vise on his arm, couldn’t resist as he was pulled into the darkness.

William Davis’s body wasn’t found until spring when the snow in the deep woods melted. By then no one really cared; so many men had died. No one ever noticed the stab wounds in the thawed, bloated, distended corpse.

Only the officers in charge that winter, living in the stone farmhouses, had known the truth: that William Davis had been a proven traitor, that he had consorted with British spies in the woods, and that he had been undone by a scrap of cloth left behind when he fled the scene of his treason. Only the officers in charge knew that his summary execution had been decreed to save the army a blow to morale which might have been the final cause of its disintegration.

And one officer—only one—knew an even greater truth which would forever remain buried with the ghastly remains of young William Davis.

N
AT UNDERHILL HAD NEVER REALLY
expected to see Bucharest again, not after fifty years, but here he was pushing eighty and there was the old city below his hotel window, dusted with a dry snowfall that blew like smoke in the grayness of late afternoon. No, he still couldn’t quite believe it, that he’d lived to see Bucharest again. He lit his old black pipe, tasted the Louisburg Square mixture he’d smoked for years, heaved a mighty sigh of relief and satisfaction, snapped his braces, and let his mind wander toward the past, beyond his reflection in the streaked pane of glass.

Night was falling sharply, like a shade being yanked down for privacy, and it could have been the city of half a century before. He’d been a student at the time, researching Transylvanian history, and he’d fallen in love with Bucharest, the night life of the cafes, dining at midnight, the almost Spanish feeling of the city without the implied cruelty he’d found in Spain. But, in fact, it wasn’t entirely the city which had smitten him, but a fetching Romanian girl with well-to-do and vaguely aristocratic parents. The war and the Russians had erased them like irrelevant markings on a blackboard, leaving Nat Underhill with something approaching a broken heart, one of life’s loose ends which seems so important at the time.

But the war had replaced the girl in his thoughts. He had been stationed in London where there were, however, a good many other Romanians. They’d all made pledges to see one another when it was all over, when—as Vera Lynn sang—the world was free. But, of course, they never did. History had never been kind to the Romanians, and the post-World War II era had been no different from any other. Boston and Bucharest seemed hardly to be points on the same planet.

In time, things changed. In the course of his various historical researches he had discovered the world of books, letters, journals, documents, and diaries. Not so much the reading of them—although he read them, too—but the buying, selling, and collecting of them. Coincidence worked its way with his life, and fifty years later two specific events had conspired to bring him back to Bucharest for a bittersweet farewell.

First, there had been the announcement of the convention of antiquarians set for the Christmas holidays in Bucharest—certainly an example of Romania’s reaching out toward the West. But he’d needed an excuse to attend; simply seeing the city again was not enough for his frugal New England soul.

Then the Davis boy had come to see him in his elegant, cluttered little shop, tucked away on Beacon Hill literally within a stone’s throw of the State House. Bill Davis was a Harvard student, stringy long hair, gold wire-rimmed spectacles, not at all designed to appeal to Nat Underhill’s Brooks Brothers aplomb. However, hideously scruffy appearance notwithstanding, the Davis boy had come bearing so incredible a piece of paper that Nat Underhill had required a chair and an immediate fresh-brewed cup of English Breakfast tea.

Was it genuine, the boy had wanted to know. Was there any way to be sure?

As to the document’s age, yes, of course there were ways to authenticate it. As to the validity of the contents—historically speaking—that was something else again, falling within the purview of the trained historian and the handwriting analyst. But there had been a feeling in his stuffy little office that morning, a feeling wholly unlike anything else his profession had ever produced. His heart had beaten oddly. His dry wrinkled hands had shaken when he touched the document itself. His mouth had dried up. In all of the years he’d spent in the company of antique bits of paper he’d never seen anything to match it. Never …