15
Dead
JANUARY–MARCH 1777
Marcus looked down the barrel of the rifle he had taken at Bunker Hill, toward the head of George III. The image was mounted to a distant tree with the point of a broken bayonet.
“Eyes or heart?” Marcus asked his audience, squinting as he took aim.
“You’ll never hit it,” a soldier scoffed. “He’s too far away.”
But Marcus was an even better shot now than he had been when he’d taken his father’s life.
The face of the king transformed itself into the face of his father.
Marcus pulled the trigger. The gun cracked into life, and bark flew. When the smoke cleared, there was a hole right between King George’s eyes.
“Take your best shot, lads.” Adam Swift walked around the crowd with his cap like an entertainer at a fair. He was Irish, wicked, clever—and a source of amusement to half the colonial army, with his songs and pranks. “A halfpenny will buy you a chance to kill the king. Do your bit for liberty. Make Georgie pay for what he’s done.”
“I want to go next!” cried a fourteen-year-old Dutch rigger named Vanderslice who had run away from a ship newly arrived in Philadelphia and joined up with the Associators soon after.
“You haven’t got a gun,” Swift pointed out.
Marcus was just about to loan Vanderslice his when two uniformed officers came into view.
“What is the meaning of this!” Captain Moulder, the nominal head of the Philadelphia Associators, surveyed the scene with disapproval. Lieutenant Cuthbert, a rawboned man in his midtwenties of Scottish extraction, was at his side.
“Just some harmless fun, sir,” Cuthbert said, glaring at Marcus and Swift.
Cutherbert’s assurances might have satisfied the captain, had Moulder not spotted King George.
“Did you take that from a picture in the college at Princeton?” Captain Moulder demanded. “Because if you did, the college would like it back.”
Swift pressed his lips together and Marcus stood at attention.
“Captain Hamilton claimed he damaged the painting, sir,” Cuthbert said, diverting the possible blame onto someone better able to withstand it. “Shot a cannonball straight through the canvas.”
“Hamilton!” Vanderslice was disgusted. “He had nothing to do with it, Cuthbert. It was the three of us who cut it out of the frame.”
This was precisely what Captain Moulder had feared.
“In my tent. Now. All three of you!” Moulder barked.
* * *
—
MARCUS STOOD IN FRONT of Captain Moulder, with Swift and Vanderslice on either side. Lieutenant Cuthbert stood at the entrance to the tent, keeping the rest of the regiment safely out of range of the captain’s wrath, though within earshot. Cuthbert was greatly beloved. He refused to put up with any nonsense from the men in his charge while ignoring most of the instructions given to him by his superior officers. It was an ideal style of leadership for the Continental army.
“I should have you all flogged,” Captain Moulder said. He held up the limp piece of canvas with the defaced image of their former ruler. “What on earth persuaded you to take it?”
Vanderslice looked at Marcus. Swift looked at the ceiling.
“We wanted to use it for target practice. Sir,” Marcus replied, looking Moulder in the eye. He struck Marcus as a bully, and Marcus had some experience with them. “It was my doing. Vanderslice and Swift tried to stop me.”
Vanderslice’s mouth gaped open in astonishment. This was not at all what had happened. At Princeton, Marcus had climbed up on Swift’s shoulder and used a British bayonet taken from the battlefield to behead the portrait of the king. Vanderslice had encouraged him every step of the way.
Swift shot Marcus an approving glance.
“And who the hell are you?” Moulder’s eyes narrowed.
“Mar—Galen Chauncey.” Marcus still tended to blurt out his baptismal name when under stress.
“We call him Doc,” Vanderslice volunteered.
“Doc? You’re not from Philadelphia. And I don’t remember signing you up,” Moulder replied.
“No. That was me, Captain.” Cuthbert lied with breezy assurance, the mark of someone skilled at fabrication. “Distant cousin. From Delaware. He’s a good shot. Thought he could be useful manning a musket in case the cannon were overrun.”
This tale of Marcus’s origins was complete fiction, but it served to quiet the captain—at least about how he’d become a part of Moulder’s regiment.