The medicine is savage here, with few exceptions. I am overseeing Lafayette’s care personally, to make sure that they do not kill him with their cures.
I have passed your letters on to Mr. Hancock, who is here in Bethlehem along with most of the Congress. They were forced to leave Philadelphia when the British took the city. Washington needs supplies if he is to succeed—ammunition, guns, horses. More than that, he needs experienced soldiers.
I must go and see to a controversy. The people of this town are very pious, and do not welcome the army and its soldiers.
In haste,
your devoted son, Matthew
17
Name
SEPTEMBER 1777
“No, Mr. Adams. It will not do,” the chevalier de Clermont said, shaking his head.
Marcus, along with the rest of the medical corps, was standing aside and waiting for the politicians to make a decision about the expansion of the hospital. Congress had decamped north from Philadelphia to the town of Bethlehem to avoid being captured by the British. A flock of women in dark clothing, each one wearing a white ruffled cap on her head, watched the proceedings with open hostility. So, too, did the leader of Bethlehem and its Moravian religious community, Johannes Ettwein.
“We must make sacrifices in the name of liberty, Chevalier. Each one of us, according to our station.” John Adams was as sharp-tongued as Ettwein and just as quick to anger.
“There are four hundred sick and wounded soldiers occupying the house belonging to the single brethren.” Ettwein was puce with irritation. “You seized our wagons to transport supplies. You are eating the food from our tables. What more must we do?”
As they stood at the corner of Main and Church Streets, Dr. Otto said something in German. One of the women snorted, then quickly disguised it with a cough. De Clermont’s lips twitched.
The more time Marcus spent with Lafayette, the more he became fascinated by the chevalier de Clermont. There seemed to be no language the man didn’t speak—French, English, Latin, German, Dutch—and nothing he could not do, from taking care of horses to examining wounds to conducting diplomacy. But it was his air of calm authority that made him indispensible at the moment.
“You cannot displace so many women, many of them elderly, Mr. Adams,” de Clermont pronounced, as if the decision were up to him and not Dr. Otto, the medical officers, or the members of Congress. “We will have to find another way to house the ill and the wounded.”
“It does not seem chivalrous to discommode the ladies, Mr. Adams,” the Marquis de Lafayette said from the wheeled chair he called La Brouette. The chevalier de Clermont had constructed it out of an ordinary wooden chair he’d found in the Single Brethren’s House when it became necessary to move from the Sun Inn. De Clermont had prescribed rest and a good diet for the marquis—neither of which could be found at the tavern, which had been utterly taken over by Congress and couriers ferrying messages. The chevalier had found everything the marquis required a few doors away from the Sun Inn at the house of the Boeckel family—including skilled nurses in the form of Mrs. Boeckel and her daughter, Liesel. When not in use, La Brouette was parked by the fire in the Boeckels’ parlor, where it received more visitors than Lafayette.
“Chivalry is dead, sir!” Adams declared.
“Not while Gil breathes,” the chevalier de Clermont murmured.
“We are fighting a war to loosen the grip of tradition, not to be enslaved by it further,” Adams continued, undeterred. “And if the Moravians of Bethlehem will not fight with us, they must prove their loyalty in other ways.”
“But it is our duty to protect these women. Imagine if it were your own dear wife, Mr. Adams, or my Adrienne.” Lafayette looked genuinely pained at the prospect. He wrote at least one letter a day to his distant spouse, who though not yet eighteen was already the mother of two children.
“Mrs. Adams would not hesitate to take in four thousand wounded soldiers if it were asked of her!” Adams, like Ettwein, did not like to be challenged.
Mr. Hancock, who had a formidable wife of his own by all accounts, looked doubtful.
“If I may,” Dr. Otto interjected. “Would it perhaps be better for the surgeons if the soldiers were kept closer together? Already we are stretched too thin, and running all through town for supplies. Perhaps we might use the gardens, and put up tents for the patients who are convalescing so that they might be in the fresh air, away from the fevers that are already spreading?”
“Fevers?” A man with the distinctive drawl of the southern colonies frowned. “Not the smallpox, surely.”