I forced down a few bites, knowing I needed the strength. I was alone in the house, but for the servants, and I wandered back up to the room John and I had shared. My uniform had been laundered and was hanging in the wardrobe, my boots shined, my hat brushed, as though I had an aide of my own.
What in the world would I do with myself? I was weary, but to lie back down in the bed and sleep the day away was an idea so foreign and distasteful, I dismissed it immediately.
When we’d moved through Philadelphia on our way to Yorktown, the dust from the army had obscured my view, settled between my teeth, and coated my eyes, and I had been unable to take in the wonders of the famed city. I wanted to walk, to explore, and I could not walk about the city by myself. Not dressed this way. I would require a companion at the minimum, and I didn’t want a stranger toddling along after me.
But if I wore my uniform, I could go wherever I wanted. All by myself.
I did not think about it more than a few seconds. I stripped off the dress and the cloying underthings. My halved corset was nowhere to be found. I frowned and searched the space. I didn’t want to destroy the one that had been provided me. Plus, I didn’t have scissors or a needle and thread to make the adjustments.
I donned my uniform without my binding, and with my waistcoat my bosom was barely visible. But I dared not risk it. The blue sash I’d worn the night before might work. I wrapped it tightly around my chest, crossing it in front and in back until I’d bandaged myself up from my armpits to my ribs. When I pushed my shirt and waistcoat over it, the effect was much more convincing.
I slipped out the front door without seeing anyone, and strode along, as giddy with my freedom and solitude as I’d been in the days after leaving the Thomases, walking through the countryside with no plan beyond enlistment.
But the joy did not last. I did not feel at all well. I looked for a place to rest for a moment, and my vision swam. Uncapping my canteen, I drank deeply, filling my belly with water. Almost as soon as I stopped, the water came right back up in a bilious flood, and a woman screamed and pointed.
“The soldier’s sick with the fever. Run fetch the sick wagon,” a shopkeeper cried and someone else cursed.
I felt my face. I wasn’t sick. I did not get sick. I had never been sick except when I’d been tossed about on a boat on the way to Chesapeake Bay, and that was not illness. But the heat radiating off my skin was undeniable. I turned back in the direction I’d come, my only aim to reach Anne’s house without vomiting again, but I’d barely gone ten steps when the world tilted, tipping me over, and everything went black.
I was dying—or perhaps I was dead. It was not what I expected death to be. I was in the dank, filthy room with the rows of other men who were dead or dying too, and then I was not. I flickered in and out, like a candle fighting a draft. Beyond pain but not beyond feeling, my mind hovered between my lives, the one I clung to, and the one I lived before. Two men were fighting over my boots.
“Those won’t fit you. He’s just a boy.”
“Well his clothes won’t fit neither of us. Too skinny. It’s too bad. They look new.”
Agrippa had insisted on the new uniform. If you are going to be the general’s aide, you can’t be dressed in rags.
Would I ever see the general again? That thought brought horror, but I was too weak to react.
How would he find me? Would he even want to?
The arguing above me faded, and I was ten years old again, riding on the back of a plodding horse, Reverend Conant shielding me from the cold.
I couldn’t go back to Middleborough. I’d shamed the Thomases. But there I was, and Reverend Conant was there too, though both were an impossibility. He was dead. Perhaps I was too. And then he was speaking, his voice just as I remembered.
“There will always be a place for you here, Deborah,” he said.
“Where is here?” I asked him.
“Here is where I am.”
“And Elizabeth?”
“Yes.”
“And what of Nat and Phineas and Jeremiah? Are they here too?” My longing to see them engulfed me, and I saw the fields where we’d run and the house where we’d grown, and the places I’d named and loved.
“They are here, yes.”
I could see the Thomas house, smiling window eyes and an open door, and boys spilling from the farm and the fields, waving and calling to me, and love overwhelmed me.
I slid down from the horse, eager to greet them, to reunite, to embrace my brothers.
They were all there, the loves I had lost—Nat, and Phineas, and Jeremiah. Even Beebe and Jimmy and Noble were there, as if they too had returned to the Thomas farm after falling at Tarrytown.