Chapter Twenty-One: The Tipping Point

Chapter Twenty-One: The Tipping Point

Sergeant Thomas did not relish the role of spy. He relished even less the role of assassin. Nevertheless, he wore the uniform of the enemy and joined in the fighting talk of the men and the ribald insults aimed at King George and the British army, although he tugged repeatedly at the collar of his jacket as if his lies would choke him. In order to avoid arousing suspicion, Sergeant Thomas and one of his lads, Corporal Starling, who was almost as reliable a marksman as he was himself, had separated. They now found themselves at opposite ends of the columns of men. The corporal was under instructions to target Colonel Henry Knox, whose powerful voice Sergeant Thomas had heard rising above the coming storm. The plan was a simple one: Washington and Knox were to be shot simultaneously when the boat transporting the General was a third of the way across the river – near enough for Sergeant Thomas to get a good shot, yet deep enough into the icy waters to prevent an easy escape should the first shot not find its mark.

Sergeant Thomas’ stolen uniform was as ripped and muddy as those of his battle-soiled comrades. Many of the men who surrounded him were poorly shod, including the determinedly cheerful blacksmith on his left, who was forever stopping to fasten the rags he had tied around his swollen and bleeding feet. Sergeant Thomas, however, was not prepared to do without shoes, for he knew what conditions lay ahead. This settled weather would not last for long.

It had been around four o’ clock in the afternoon that General Washington, two thousand four hundred men and a couple of hundred horse set off from New Town. Now, as they marched along snowy roads towards the Delaware River and McConkey’s Ferry, the setting sun tinged the wintry landscape red and for a while the rim of the horizon glowed as if it were on fire. The American Patriots had fear in their hearts, as well they might, embarking on a secret mission and facing an army that was larger, better equipped and better disciplined than their own. Yet Sergeant Thomas envied them more than a little, for they did not trudge through this snow because they had been forced to, nor because, like him, they were career soldiers or mercenaries. Rather, they were here because they had chosen to be here. They were here to fight for their rights and their freedoms and a cause they believed in. Sergeant Thomas did not understand the politics of it all, nor did he seek to, for in his experience of life there were always several sides to any argument. But he recognised that they fought with a purpose and with a passion that had not been laid on them by their superiors. They had seen defeat after defeat; the superior British forces had chased them across New Jersey; they had seen their numbers drastically depleted. The Patriot cause was on the brink of failure. Nevertheless, this night each one of them was prepared to follow their General whose watchword Victory or Death!

All around him, men kept up their morale by reciting Thomas Paine’s words. How ironic it was, thought Sergeant Thomas, that it was an Englishman who incited the colonists to rise up against his own monarch, against his own country. But now that he had seen with his own eyes how powerful a nation America would become on the world’s stage, he could understand why Lord Luxon wished to tip the scales in Britain’s favour. The stakes were of the highest order.

The foot soldiers who surrounded him had committed Paine’s stirring lines to memory, and repeated them so often in the darkening gloom that they rang ceaselessly in Sergeant Thomas’ ears like a refrain:

Sergeant Thomas distrusted peddlers of words. Before every battle, every campaign, the officers would practice their rhetoric on the men. Like the Pied Piper, those with mastery over words could inflame passions and incite violence and make men follow them, irrespective of the truth of what they said. Give me the plain honest talk of an inarticulate man, he thought, over any number of Thomas Paines. Words are deadlier than any weapon.

As dusk fell, Sergeant Thomas caught sight of George Washington riding ahead of them on his chestnut horse, an erect figure in a billowing cape, his resplendent uniform contrasting starkly with the tattered rags that covered his men. The General brought his mount to a halt and turned around to look at the columns of soldiers marching towards the Delaware. There was resolve and determination on the face of the colonial rebel. It suddenly seemed to Sergeant Thomas that Washington’s stare hovered over him, as if he had pierced his disguise, and he turned away, unsettled. When the time comes I shall look the General square in the face, Sergeant Thomas told himself. He shall not doubt who has fired the shot. But I shall not look on him now, not until I have to.

The column came to a halt, as happened very frequently, though he could rarely see the cause of it. The men fell to talking quietly between themselves. Thick clouds had gathered overhead and it was beginning to spit with rain. The blacksmith turned to look at Sergeant Thomas with what little light remained of Christmas .

“Will you sign up to fight beyond the New Year, as General Washington would have us do?”

“I am committed to following General Washington until he draws his final breath,” Sergeant Thomas replied.

“Then let us hope your service will be a long one! As for me, I am torn. My wife and children have already endured more than a man can ask of them. Without my labours to provide for them, how can they eat? How can they tolerate this bitter cold?”

The large-framed man patted his chest pocket, pulled out a folded letter and immediately pushed back the precious document to protect it from the rain.

“My wife begs me to return. Our youngest is sick. Yet how can I refuse General Washington’s call? Do you have a family? Must you also choose between your loved ones and your country?”

Sergeant Thomas had fought on two continents for more years than he cared to remember and, to him, all soldiers from any country were alike, pawns in their masters’ game. If he encountered this blacksmith on the battlefield he would skewer him with his bayonet without hesitation. It was the way things were.

He patted the man’s back. “I am truly sorry to hear about your child. No. I have no family. My life is my own to lose”

“A man should have children,” said the other. “I have eight. Five boys and three girls. When I first came here, twenty years ago and more, I vowed I should give my family a better life than my parents had been able to give me. It has not always been easy but I’ve reaped the rewards of my labours. This country has been good to us. I fear what will happen if we lose this war.”

The blacksmith put Sergeant Thomas in mind of the Irishman, Michael, in his air-conditioned SoHo bar, who was forever showing him photos of his family and urging him to settle in America where if you worked hard anything was possible. Two and half centuries later it would be a different world but in that way, at least, things had not changed.

“Why do you smile?”

“’Tis nothing,” replied Sergeant Thomas. “A memory, that is all…”

Sergeant Thomas fell silent and the blacksmith did not interrupt his thoughts. Presently the columns of men started to move off again and Sergeant Thomas looked up at the sky and the mass of ominous black clouds moving towards them from the north east.

By eleven o’clock the wind was whipping into a hurricane and driving sleet stung the cheeks of Lord Luxon and William. The two men were disguised as farmers, with scarves tied around their heads to prevent their hats blowing away. It was an attire that appealed little to Lord Luxon. But even he was too preoccupied to think much about appearances that night. The wind roared through the branches overhead, and blew so hard they struggled at times to keep upright.

They had not intended to bring with them Sally, Sergeant Thomas’s faithful, if hideous, hound. As they embarked on their fatal journey to the past, she had leapt onto her master at the very moment the anti-gravity machine left one century for another. As there was no way to send her back without disrupting their plans, Sergeant Thomas had entrusted her to William while he did his duty for King and country. Powerful scents met the dog’s sensitive nostrils: of horses and gunpowder, and wounded, unwashed men. And she sniffed the air, alert and fearful. There were unfamiliar sounds, too, that sent her off kilter: the incessant trudge of thousands of feet through snow, the murmur of a great crowd echoing over the empty distances, the whinnying and snorting of horses, reluctant to step onto icy ferries, the crunch of canon wheels over frozen ground… For a city dog, more used to the honking of horns and the smell of pizzas and gutters, this overload of her senses was too much to bear. She lifted her large head and barked repeatedly. The wind carried her cries away from the river and into the starless night. Lord Luxon kicked the animal mercilessly in the ribs, pushing her onto her side. She struggled to get back up again, whimpering pitifully, her coat covered in snow. When William approached her she snarled at him.

“Shhh!” whispered William into her ear. “We are within a hundred yards of the enemy. Would you have us all killed?!”

William crouched down in the snow and tied his handkerchief around the animal’s muzzle to muffle her cries before Lord Luxon carried out his repeated threat to silence her himself. When he had finished, William grabbed her by the collar, pushed down her rear so that she sat, whining through her gag, on the frozen earth. He stroked her head and caressed her floppy ears to comfort her.

Lord Luxon, meanwhile, peered out at the army massing on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River. The night was very dark but long tongues of flames from the bonfires, dancing and spluttering in the gusts of air, cast enough light over the scene for Lord Luxon’s purposes.

He watched ranks of men stamping their feet and blowing on their fingers and rotating close to the fires. Behind them, a ghostly flotilla of ferries and boats waited on the black river.

“One would think we were gathered on the banks of the river Styx!” exclaimed Lord Luxon. “But where is the ferryman to transport these wretched sinners to hell?”

William said nothing, assuming, rightly, that no response was required. But, he thought to himself, they had their own Cerberus, watchdog of Hades, in Sally. She might not have three heads but she was, without doubt, the ugliest dog he had ever clapped eyes on…

Presently, above the howling wind, they heard the deep bass voice of Colonel Henry Knox ordering parties of men to shift the great slabs of ice that were gathering at the river’s edge making embarkation impossible. Lord Luxon caught a flash of steel as the big man waved his sabre in the air, directing the men.

“There is our man, at last!” exclaimed Lord Luxon, steam coming from his mouth with every breath. “But where the devil are Sergeant Thomas and Corporal Starling?”

He took out his night-vision binoculars and scanned the faces of the soldiers. After several minutes he gave up looking for his own men and concentrated on looking for the whereabouts of the Commander-in-Chief of the American army. The sound of men hacking at the ice and levering it away from the bank with poles punctuated Lord Luxon’s feverish thoughts. Adrenaline raced through his veins and made him forget the cold and the wind. He thought of glory, and of his father’s disapproval of him, and of his dead uncles, and of sweeping aside once and for all the mistakes of his youth. This, he thought, would be his legacy to England, and England would forever be in his debt.

Suddenly, Lord Luxon saw what he had been waiting for and his heart missed a beat. The time had come! General Washington was climbing into a boat manned by perhaps a dozen men. Through sheets of snowflakes Lord Luxon could distinguish his hat and cape and sabre, and saw the mariners holding up their oars and poles to attention whilst blocks of ice smacked against the side of the boat. The rim of the boat had been painted yellow and Lord Luxon watched this thin stripe bob up and down in the water as General Washington climbed in, causing the vessel to list from side to side. General Washington seemed to be about to sit down but then changed his mind on account of the freezing water sloshing about at the bottom of the boat. He remained standing, legs wide apart for balance.

“William, do you see Sergeant Thomas?”

“I do not, Sir.”

“Damn his eyes! Where is the fellow?”

Lord Luxon was becoming agitated. He reached up and tore off a bare branch from the tree that swayed above them. Sally, who had not taken her eyes off Lord Luxon, flinched, fearing another beating. She whimpered despite William’s handkerchief. Lord Luxon glared at her.

“And confound his wretched hound!”

He took a swipe at her and William cried out as the animal yanked her head from his grasp and bounded away from her tormentor and towards her beloved master. Sally knew he was near. She could detect his scent even amidst thousands of others. Lord Luxon and William both ran after her but even with her clumsy, lolloping gait, she could outrun them with ease. They stopped under cover of trees some fifty yards from the bank. Lord Luxon stood white-faced and grim-jawed. He surveyed General Washington standing proud in his boat and Colonel Knox cupping his hands to his mouth and bellowing orders to the watermen from high on the bank. He could see the ripple of movement as men moved out of the way of the rampaging canine.

“Shoot, damn you, shoot!” hissed Lord Luxon. “Before all is lost…”

Astride in the boat amidst the seated mariners, General Washington made an easy target. Sergeant Thomas stood in the dark willing him to turn around for he had no desire to shoot the man in the back. The wind was very strong now. His ears were full of the howling wind and Colonel Knox’s incessant commands bellowing out across the river. Flurries of snow swirled in front of his eyes, sometimes making his victim disappear completely. Twenty yards and two bonfires separated Sergeant Thomas from Corporal Starling and each had managed to catch the other’s eye. Now that the General’s boat was ten or fifteen yards from the bank, the moment had come. This was it. They had arrived at the tipping point of history. Sergeant Thomas’s stomach lurched. His mouth had gone dry. He gave the pre-arranged signal, a double nod of the head, which Corporal Starling repeated back to him. Sergeant Thomas started to count to thirty which he knew his accomplice would be doing at the same time. Then Sergeant Thomas knelt down, placed his musket on the ground and took out the small twenty-first century revolver from his pocket. He screwed on the silencer as they had practiced a hundred times. Under cover of the snow and the wind and the dark, and in the midst of all this frantic activity, not a soul noticed him taking aim.

“Twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four-”

Sally’s forelegs landed square in the middle of his back, pushing him forward onto the hard ground. His forehead hit something hard and for several moments he saw stars and was unable to move. After hours in the freezing wind he suddenly felt warm. Sally lay on top of him. As he tried to get up, the dog nuzzled his neck and William’s handkerchief, now soaked with slobber, wet his ear. Sergeant Thomas pushed himself up, aghast, and thrust Sally roughly away from him. A terrible panic came over Sergeant Thomas as he heard shouting and the sound of running feet. He stood up. Hundreds of men were rushing in the direction of Colonel Knox. Confusion reigned. Soldiers raced around the bank as if someone had kicked over an ants’ nest. He glanced at the river. General Washington was shouting at the oarsmen to return to shore. The gun! The gun! Sergeant Thomas dropped to the ground and felt blindly for the weapon. His fingers closed over the barrel of the gun and he leapt to his feet, feeling for the trigger as he took aim. Sally bumped up against him.

“Heel!” he cried.

The gagged animal sat down obediently and looked up at her master as he pointed his gun at George Washington’s heart. She whimpered. Sergeant Thomas glanced down at her and the thought scorched through his mind like a fork of lightening that the animal was Washington’s guardian angel. Was she telling him that he was not meant to assassinate the first President of the United States? The faces of the blacksmith and Michael in his bar in SoHo appeared to him. He thought of the people going about their business in Prince Street, and then of all the people who must have come to America from every corner of the globe to start a new life. And then he thought of the corrupt aristocrat who had hired him, whose wish it was that General Washington should die so that Britain should retain its colony. And for what purpose? Who would benefit? Ever so slowly, as if his arm had a mind of its own, Sergeant Thomas lowered the gun…

Neither man nor beast saw the slight figure pushing his way through crowds of running men, hurtling towards them through the wind and snow. Sally was as slow to react as her master when Lord Luxon tore the gun from his hand.

“No!” shouted Sergeant Thomas into the wind.

The cry reached General Washington who turned instinctively towards it, even in the midst of all the commotion on shore, his keen eyes searching the darkness. By the flickering light of a bonfire, he saw first the shape of a man and then the shape of a great dog collapse to the ground. As he opened his mouth to raise the alarm he glimpsed the glint of metal and a hand wielding a strange weapon that pointed directly at him. Lord Luxon squeezed the trigger. It weighed so little, the bullet that sped across the stormy night to lodge into a human heart, and yet it had gathered enough momentum to topple a nation. Without a sound, the Commander-in-Chief of the Patriot forces fell into the Delaware River, his blood staining the blocks of ice that knocked against the boat. Four brave mariners jumped into the freezing waters to rescue their leader. By the time General Washington’s lifeless body was heaved onto dry land, Lord Luxon had disappeared into the night and the Patriot cause was already lost.