The Once and Future Spy Read Online Free Page A

again in a knot at the nape of his neck, which was the style he preferred. He would have been paler
     than usual, and weaker; he had “taken the smallpox” (as the inoculation was called) three weeks before when he was home on
     leave and was only just getting back on his feet. One day in mid-August, when the sky over New York had the dull sheen of
     pewter, Nate and his friend from New London, S. Hempstead, were sent in from Haarlem to see if they could requisition bayonets,
     which the eighty or so men in Nate’s Company (part of Colonel Webb’s Nineteenth Connecticut Volunteers) desperately needed.
     Rumor had it that a Dutch ship carrying bullets and bayonets had run the blockade and docked on the North River.
    Nate wouldn’t have been in a particularly good mood that day. The girl with whom he had had “polite intercourse” (Nate’s phrase,
     not mine) while he was teaching at Haddam’s Landing—she had been one of the handful of girls in his early morning Latin class—had
     written to say that she had gotten engaged to a constable from Hartford.When the cat’s away, mice will play, is what Nate must have thought. (It’s what I would have thought if I had been in his
     shoes, but that may tell more about me than Nate; it certainly says something about how I reconstruct history.) The sweltering
     heat was probably accumulating in drifts, and Nate and his friend would have stopped at Cape’s Tavern on the Broad Way for
     a tankard of cool ale. Later they would have scrambled over the barricades that had been thrown up on the streets sloping
     down to the river and asked some of Colonel Glover’s Marbleheaders, in their tarred fisherman’s trousers, where they could
     find the Dutch ship. The Marblehead men would have shrugged; as far as they knew there was no Dutch ship, and no bayonets.
    It would have been like Nate to suggest that they take a gander at the enemy before heading back up the Broad Way to Haarlem;
     he was by nature and instinct an adventurous soul who had the fears any sane man had but constantly tested himself against
     them. He and his friend would have climbed onto one of the parapets at Old Fort Amsterdam to gaze at the forest of masts off
     Staten Island. One of General Knox’s gunners, sunning himself next to his cannon, might have noticed Nate was an officer and
     decided to bait him.
    “Count the masts if you got the nerve.”
    Nate would have made a stab at it (there was never a challenge he wouldn’t rise to), but soon given up. There were too many.
    I can hear the gunner drawling, “How ‘bout you, Sergeant?”
    I can see Nate smiling that broad ear-to-ear grin of his and saying, “Go ahead, Stephen.”
    Stephen surely shook his head. “A man could lose his taste for rebellion counting the enemy.”
    The gunner would have laughed pleasantly. “We been countin’ them out with long glasses. Ten ships of the line, twenty frigates,
     seventy-three warships all told, another hundred fifty or so transports. Heard General Knox say as how this was the goldurnest
     force the lobsters ever sent ‘gainst anyone.”
    If I know my Nate, he would have remarked on the note of pride in the gunner’s voice. And he would have thought: He’s an optimist
     because he doesn’t know enough.
    It was about then that Nate and his friend Stephen heard the slow mournful beating of the kettledrum. The sound seemed to
     come from the bowling green, Nate’s old stamping ground; he hadkicked around a football on the green when his company had been billeted there.
    “What’s that about?” Stephen asked.
    The gunner, a burly cordwainer from the Maine Territories, bit off a plug of tobacco and spit some juice onto the parapet.
     “Ain’t you heard? There’s gonna be a hangin’. Go ahead and watch if you got the stomach for it. There ain’t no charge.”
    Nate and Stephen surely exchanged looks here. Stephen, who at twenty-two was a year older than Nate and never let him forget
     it, said