A Breath of Snow and Ashes - Diana Gabaldon [478]
“What’s this?” I picked it up; it was amazingly heavy for its size.
“A present from his Lordship, for wee Jemmy.” He lit the beeswax taper from the brazier and held it over the seam of the folded letter. “A set of lead soldiers, Bobby says.”
77
THE EIGHTEENTH OF APRIL
ROGER CAME AWAKE QUITE SUDDENLY , with no notion what had wakened him. It was full dark, but the air had the still, inward feel of the small hours; the world holding its breath, before dawn comes on a rising wind.
He turned his head on the pillow and saw that Brianna was awake, too; she lay looking upward, and he caught the brief flicker of her eyelids as she blinked.
He moved a hand to touch her, and hers closed over it. An adjuration to silence? He lay very still, listening, but heard nothing. An ember broke in the hearth with a muffled crack and her hand tightened. Jemmy flung himself over in bed with a rustle of quilts, let out a small yelp, and fell silent. The night was undisturbed.
“What is it?” he said, low-voiced.
She didn’t turn to look at him; her eyes were fixed now on the window, a dark gray rectangle, barely visible.
“Yesterday was the eighteenth of April,” she said. “It’s here.” Her voice was calm, but there was something in it that made him move closer, so they lay side by side, touching from shoulder to foot.
Somewhere to the north of them, men were gathering in the cold spring night. Eight hundred British troops, groaning and cursing as they dressed by candlelight. Those who had gone to bed rousing to the beat of the drum passing by the houses and warehouses and churches where they quartered, those who hadn’t, stumbling from dice and drink, the warm hearths of taverns, the warm arms of women, hunting lost boots and seizing weapons, turning out by twos and threes and fours, clanking and mumbling through the streets of frozen mud to the muster point.
“I grew up in Boston,” she said, her voice softly conversational. “Every kid in Boston learned that poem, somewhere along the line. I learned it in fifth grade.”
“Listen, my children, and you shall hear/Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Roger smiled, envisioning her in the uniform of Saint Finbar’s parochial school, blue overall jumper, white blouse, and knee socks. He’d seen her fifth-grade school photograph once; she looked like a small, fierce, disheveled tiger that some maniac had dressed in doll’s clothes.
“That’s the one. On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five/Hardly a man is now alive/Who remembers that famous day and year.”
“Hardly a man,” Roger echoed softly. Someone—who? A householder, eavesdropping on the British commanders quartered in his house? A barmaid, bringing mugs of pokered hot rum to a couple of sergeants? There was no keeping of secrets, not with eight hundred men on the move. It was all a matter of time. Someone had sent word from the occupied city, word that the British meant to seize the stored arms and powder in Concord, and at the same time, arrest Hancock and Samuel Adams—the founder of the Committee of Safety, the inflammatory speaker, the leaders of this treasonous rebellion—reported to be in Lexington.
Eight hundred men to capture two? Good odds. And a silversmith and his friends, alarmed at the news, had set out into that cold night. Bree continued:
“He said to his friend, ‘If the British march
By land or sea from the town tonight,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light—
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.’”
“They don’t write poems like that anymore,” Roger said. But in spite of his cynicism, he couldn’t bloody help seeing it: the steam of a horse’s breath, white in darkness, and across the black water, the tiny star of a lantern, high above the sleeping town. And then another.
“What happened next?” he said.
“Then he said ‘Good-night!’ and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just