New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [162]
At the end of August, an unexpected visitor came to the house: Captain Rivers. But the news he brought was bleak. He was giving up.
“South Carolina has been in Patriot hands for two years now, but in North Carolina, many Loyalists like myself have held on. Since spring, however, life’s become impossible. My wife and children have already left for England. And there’s nothing I can do except surrender my plantation into your hands, in the hope that you can recover your debt one day.”
“The slaves?”
“The main value lies there, of course. I’ve transferred them to the estate of a friend, who’s in a safer area. But how long he’ll be able to stay I don’t know.” He gave Master a detailed inventory of the slaves. “Many are skilled, and therefore valuable. If you can find a buyer for them, they’re yours to sell.”
“You can’t hold out a little longer?” Master asked. “Relief may be at hand.”
For with Philadelphia abandoned, the latest British talk was of a big strike against the South. General Clinton had already announced he was sending an expedition to seize one of the French Caribbean islands, and another to Georgia, where the Patriot garrisons were small, and the Loyalists many. But Rivers shook his head.
“Diversions, Master. We can split our forces as many ways as we like, and run around in the huge wilderness of America, but in my opinion, we’ll never tame it. Not now.”
At dinner that evening the conversation was frank. They were all old friends—John Master and Abigail, Rivers and Grey Albion. At one point, Rivers turned to Master and asked: “I once asked if you’d think of retiring to England. You weren’t interested then, I think. But might you consider it now?”
“My father will gladly serve you, sir,” Albion chipped in, “if you care to send funds to England for safe keeping. He already holds balances of yours.”
“Let’s not think of that yet,” Master replied. But it was significant to him that both Rivers and young Albion should be suggesting such an abandonment. It was discouraging.
Yet his real agony of mind came not from causes military or financial. It was moral.
In the spring, the British government, alarmed by the entry of France into the war, had sent commissioners to New York to try once more to reach a settlement with the colonists. Master had met them before they went down to try their luck with the Congress. The best of them, in his opinion, was a man called Eden. Yet having enjoyed a lengthy talk with him, Master had returned home shaking his head.
“It seems,” he told Abigail, “that their instructions from King George are to bribe the members of the Congress. I had to tell him, ‘They aren’t the British Parliament, you know.’”
Only a day or two afterward did he reflect with some irony that, without even considering the matter, he had rightly assumed that the Congress he opposed would have higher moral standards than the government he loyally supported.
But the discovery that shook him came at the end of August.
James’s letter from West Point had asked him to perform one service which his father had put off for some weeks now—only because he feared it might be time-consuming. At the end of August, feeling a little guilty, he decided he really must attend to it.
One of James’s men had a brother who had been captured by the British. The family having received no word of him for more than a year, but believing he was in prison in New York, James asked if his father could discover what had become of the fellow. His name was Sam Flower.
It took Master a whole day to find out that the unit to which Flower belonged had first been kept in a church building in the city, but then they had been sent across the East River. No other information was available.