“He is not at all what you expected,” I told myself. His height and form would be notable to anyone. He was at least six feet two, and he was lean in the way everyone was lean—strain, toil, and war took the fat off men—but it only made his musculature more pronounced. He didn’t wear a wig, and his hair was a ruddy brown that looked as though it might have been red in his youth.
He was lovely to behold.
I frowned. This realization did not reassure me. I had not had a similar reaction to anyone before. I had never dwelt on a man’s looks. Not the men in Middleborough, not the Thomas brothers, and not the men in my company. My heart had never quickened or my stomach trembled when they were near.
“It is because he has startled you,” I said. “You thought you knew John Paterson, and you didn’t. It is only surprise that has made your insides quake. That is all.”
It was as good an explanation as any, and I accepted it stubbornly. “That is all it is,” I insisted to the river below. But it troubled me all the same.
11
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS
General Paterson did not come the next night or the next, and my company was given a new assignment away from West Point. The last time I saw him before we left, he was inspecting the garrison with Colonel Kosciuszko, a Polish military engineer who had drawn up the design and continued to oversee the building of fortifications in the highlands.
I watched them ride away, the colonel gesturing this way and that, pointing out new redoubts and batteries, Paterson nodding his head. They were of a similar age, and both had reddish tails beneath their hats, but that is where their similarities ended. The general was big where the colonel was small, the general was quiet and self-contained where the colonel was animated and verbose.
Colonel Kosciuszko resided at the Red House as well, along with his aide, a young African man in his midtwenties named Agrippa Hull, who accompanied the two officers on a horse of his own. Hull had a flashing smile, a direct gaze, and a set to his shoulders that bespoke self-assurance, like he knew he belonged—or perhaps didn’t care to. Everyone called him Grippy, but I thought him too impressive for the nickname and determined to call him Mr. Hull if ever I had the chance to address him.
He was a favorite at the Point, though I had not yet made his acquaintance. I wanted to. Elizabeth had mentioned him once in a letter. He’d been born a freeman in Stockbridge, near Lenox, and had helped John Paterson raise a local militia in 1775. He’d been appointed aide-de-camp to Colonel Kosciuszko at the colonel’s request, but it was the general he was committed to, and the two men had stayed together for much of the war. I was almost as intrigued by him as I was with the general, and I wrote a long letter to Elizabeth in my journal, describing him in great detail and formulating questions I might ask him if given the chance.
Rumor was that the construction of a great hall would soon be underway. Colonel Kosciuszko had already drawn up the plans. It would give the soldiers stationed in the quiet highlands something to do now that the fighting was almost completely in the south.
But I was not to be spared, nor were the men in my company.
Between the highlands and New York City, which the British held, was a thirty-mile stretch of farmland referred to as no-man’s-land. The territory, centered around Westchester, was considered a neutral zone, but those living there had been continually caught between the opposing armies, their property taken or burned, their cattle stolen, their crops commandeered. Most of the people had fled.
On our march to the Point, we’d cut through the area to reach the Hudson. Little remained of what once had been a vast and thriving community. Fertile countryside, rich and grassy, lay dormant. Homes were burned out and abandoned, fences listed, fruit rotted on the trees, and scavengers roamed the countryside.
The Westchester Militia, made up of men from the area, were charged with protection of the zone by General Washington. He’d assigned light infantry units to assist the militia and challenge all British troops that encroached past their lines, but six years as a battlefield had reduced the area to little more than fallow fields and hunting grounds.
Those who couldn’t leave were preyed upon by a brigade of loyalists and British deserters led by a man by the name of James DeLancey, a colonist and once the sheriff of Westchester.
DeLancey and his scavengers and profiteers wore red coats and considered themselves British soldiers, but they were more akin to the Hessians—soldiers for hire—than the British regulars, though DeLancey held the rank of colonel. Entire communities had declared their loyalty to the Crown in hopes that their property—and their lives—would be spared by DeLancey’s Brigade.