“That’s an ancient-looking musket,” said the captain.
“It did serve my father well enough at Braddock Down. I reckon it will serve me now.”
The captain looked at him more narrowly. “At Braddock Down? I’ve read about that battle. Tell me, did your father fight for Cromwell’s parliament, or for the Stewart king who lost his head?”
Wilde was too clever to be led into revealing his own family’s leanings in these troubled times. He only said, “My father fought for what was right.”
The captain had to be content with that, and having run through the remainder of the questions, made a mark beside Wilde’s name and let him pass, and called me. “Williamson?” As I stepped up, he looked down at his list and frowned. “Would you be Adam Williamson, or Peter?”
Before I could answer, his lieutenant leaned in with a look of quick apology at me. “That’s Adam, sir. You see this note here, in the margin? Peter Williamson, the father, he donated a new flag to our militia company and earned himself the right to be exempt from service.”
“Ah.” The captain’s tone implied he found this an annoyance. He asked the lieutenant, “And there are no other men of age within their household?”
“Just a servant, who’s also exempt.”
“I see.” The captain seemed at least to find my gun—a newer carbine with a shorter muzzle that made it more useful in the woods—more to his satisfaction. Having made sure that I also had the necessary number of flints for it, together with powder and paper and bullets for cartridges, and having made a close inspection of the leather cartridge case I wore strapped to my belt, he made a mark beside my name as well, and motioned me aside.
“And now the tedium begins,” said Jacob Wilde as I came near where he was standing. “Counter-marchings, wheelings, doublings, all the drill, and none of it of any use at all once we get north of here, into the swamp and forest. Bloody waste of time.” He grinned, and stretched his hand out. “Jacob Wilde.”
And with that handshake he became my friend.
He was older than me. In that year he’d have been in his early thirties, whereas I’d not yet turned seventeen, but sometimes you meet somebody with whom that doesn’t matter. In the way of small communities we each knew much about the other without ever having met. Leastways, we thought we did.
Despite the rumors that he had done murder, he was quick to offer kindness.
He said, “It is a shame the air in the Barbados did not heal your mother’s lungs. Let’s hope our bracing air will see her soon recovered.”
The air was not so very bracing by the time we headed north to Albany.
For those who’ve not endured midsummer in the province of New York, the fields in afternoon become alive with insects humming in the heat. The air grows heavy and the wind brings no relief, but only gathers clouds that chase their shadows swiftly overland or turn to sudden, violent thunderstorms. There are fair days as well, but with the heat comes sickness, and that summer while our New York forces waited up at Albany for more men from Connecticut to join us, we were struck by smallpox.
Wilde and I were fortunate. We passed our days, while waiting, in the company of Albany’s Dutch volunteers—a group of men with whom Wilde got on well. He spoke their language near enough, and might have passed for one of them with his light hair and build, and on the Sabbath he would sit with them and listen to their chaplain, which did please them.
The first time he returned from such a service, I said, “I thought you were an Episcopalian.”
“I am. But I trust God will find me anywhere I choose to pray.”
He did believe that. He had little time or patience for divisions among men.
I watched him shake his head when, in the last days of July, the major general from Connecticut arrived with his own troops and everyone fell into argument.
“See, this is the problem with our colonies. We brought these disagreements from our old land to our new one. Faith, my daughters have more courtesy with one another,” he told me, “and they’ve but barely left the cradle.”
The Connecticut troops did not like our New York ones. The feeling was mutual. Nor did the Dutch volunteers care to serve under any authority but that of Albany’s mayor or his brother. The major general disdained the entire arrangement—our lack of supplies and our sickness were only the start of his list of complaints.
But we gathered our forces and marched, notwithstanding, a hundred miles up through the wilderness, to the place called Wood Creek near the lake that the French called Champlain.