New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [164]
“He died, sir, six months ago.”
When asked where Flower was buried, the officer waved in the direction of the salt meadows. The bodies were tipped into trenches there and all around, he explained. There were so many of them, and besides, they were only criminals.
Master said nothing. At least he had his information. Before leaving the vessel, however, he noticed signs that there had recently been a fire in the fo’c’sle. It clearly hadn’t spread far, and he couldn’t imagine the stern officer at his side letting such a thing get out of hand, but he thought to ask: “However would you get the prisoners off, if a fire were to take hold?”
“I shouldn’t, sir.”
“You’d let them get to the water, though, surely?”
“No, sir. I’d batten down the hatches and let them burn. Those are my orders.”
John Master returned to the city in a somber mood. In the first place, he was shocked that Englishmen, his fellow countrymen, could behave in such a way. The Patriots might or might not be legal prisoners of war, there was an honest legal quarrel over that—but whatever their status, what did it say of the humanity of his own government that they could treat these men in such a way? You may call a man a rebel, he thought, you may call him a criminal, you may say he should be hung—especially when he is a stranger and not your own son. But faced with farmers, small traders, honest laborers, decent men as the Patriots so clearly were, what kind of blindness, what prejudice or, God save us, what cruelty could induce the British authorities to lock them up in hulks and murder them like that?
Of course, he told himself, he had not known such things were going on. The hulks were out of sight. True, Susan on her visits had told him of Patriot newspapers that railed against the prisoners’ treatment. But these were gross exaggerations, he had assured her, stoutly denied by such men as his good friend General Howe.
Yet had he ever gone into the city prisons, only a few hundred yards from his door? No, he had not. And as he considered this circumstance another, and most unpleasant, phrase began to echo in his mind: the words of the loathsome fellow on the first hulk. “You think it’s any better over there?”
During the next week, he began to make his own discreet inquiries. He said nothing to Albion—it might put him in a difficult position—but there were plenty of people in the town from whom he could get information. A friendly chat with a prison guard; a conspiratorial word or two with an officer. Quietly and patiently, using all the skills at drawing people out that he’d mastered in the taverns of the town so long ago, he gradually found out all he wanted.
The guard from the hulk was right: the city prisons were practically the same. Behind the walls of converted churches and sugar houses, the prisoners had been dying like flies, their bodies loaded on carts and, often as not, taken away in the darkness. Loring, whose wife had been old General Howe’s companion, had stolen their possessions and the money for their food. And for all his denials, there could be no question: genial General Howe, with whom he had so often dined, had known about it all.
He felt sadness, shame, disgust. Yet what could he do? Others might raise the issue, but if he did, what would people say? Master has a Patriot son—his loyalty would be in question. There was nothing he could do. For the sake of Abigail and little Weston, he must keep silent.
It was no small agony to him therefore when, early in September, his grandson came to ask for guidance. To give him company, they had sent Weston to a small school nearby, where he was taught with other Loyalist children. Foreseeing that the subject of his father James must sooner or later arise, Master had told the little boy most carefully what to say. And now it had come up.
“So what did you say?” his grandfather asked.
“That my father was