Adam. It had to be Adam. The problem was that he didn’t know where Adam was supposed to be. He’d not seen his cousin in more than a year, and such conversation as he’d had lately with Papa and Uncle Hal hadn’t touched on Adam at all, everyone being taken up with Benjamin’s death.
The last he had heard of Adam, his cousin was a captain of infantry, but (wisely, he thought) not in his father’s regiment. Hal’s sons had all concluded, early in their military careers, that their chances of remaining on good terms with their father depended on not serving under him, and they purchased their commissions accordingly.
“Well, start from the other end, then, ass,” he said impatiently. “The only way Adam would have found out where Dottie was, is from Denzell. We assume Denzell is with Washington, and Uncle Hal says that Washington is in winter quarters in New Jersey.”
All right, then. He belched slightly, tasting the sweet decay of the apple’s soft spots, and relaxed a little, hunching his greatcoat up round his ears and curling his toes inside his cold, damp boots. He didn’t need to know where Adam was or had been, if this reasoning was sound. But his guess was that Adam was with Clinton’s army in New York—if they still were in New York. If Clinton was intending to go take Charles Town, though, surely he wouldn’t be doing it so late in the year? Still, if the Hunters were not with Washington in New Jersey, Adam was his only source of information as to their whereabouts.
Betsy lifted her tail and deposited a steaming cascade of horse apples, two feet away from where William sat on an upturned pail. William leaned over and rubbed his frozen hands above the warmth, thinking.
He did wonder why Denzell had decided to send for Dottie, having placed her with the Elmsworths for safety, but that wasn’t important. His own choice seemed clear: either ride on to New York and look for Adam, go to New Jersey and look for Denzell, or turn round and ride back to Savannah and tell Uncle Hal what he’d learned.
He dismissed this last option.
It was roughly the same distance from where he was to either New York or New Jersey—about three hundred miles. He glanced out through the open half door at the cloudy sky. Maybe a week, if the roads were decent.
“Which they won’t be,” he said, watching small hard flecks of what wasn’t quite yet snow drift in to land on his hands and face, melting in tiny pinpricks of cold. “Nothing else to do, though, is there?”
THE NEW YEAR had come before William arrived at Morristown. He’d had plenty of time on the road to make his decision. And while he assured himself that Morristown was the logical place to begin his inquiries, since this was where Denzell was and Dottie would likely be with him by now, his conscience observed acidly that this decision was the counsel of cowardice as much as logic. He didn’t want to walk into Sir Henry Clinton’s headquarters as a shabbily dressed civilian and face the stares—if not the blunt questions—of men he knew.
He just didn’t.
Morristown itself boasted two churches and two taverns, with a cluster of maybe fifty houses and a large mansion near the edge of town. From the flags adorning this house, and the sentries before it, it was evidently now Washington’s headquarters. William wouldn’t mind seeing the fellow, but curiosity could wait.
Curiosity, though, caused him to ask someone on the town green why so many folk were waiting outside the churches, lined up and stamping their feet against the cold.
“Smallpox,” he was told. “Inoculations. General Washington’s orders. Troops and townspeople alike—like it or not. They been doin’ it in the churches every Monday and Wednesday.”
William had heard of inoculation for smallpox; Mother Claire had mentioned it once, in Philadelphia. Inoculation meant doctors, and Washington’s name meant army doctors. Thanking his informant, he strode to the head of one line and, tipping his hat to the person at the door, pushed his way inside as though he had a right to be there.
A doctor and his assistant were working near the baptismal font at the front of the church, using the altar for their supplies. The doctor wasn’t Denzell Hunter, but he was a place to start, and William strode purposefully up the aisle, drawing surprised looks from the people waiting.
The doctor, a fat gentleman with an eared cap pulled down over his brow and a bloody apron, was standing by the baptismal font, this structure having been temporarily topped with a wide piece of board on which were the tools of inoculation: two small knives, a pair of forceps, and a bowl full of what looked like very thin, dark-red worms. As William approached, he saw the doctor, his breath wreathing round his face, cut a small slit in the hand of a woman who had turned her face away, grimacing at the cut. The doctor swiftly wiped away the welling blood, picked up one of the worms, which turned out to be threads soaked in something nasty—smallpox? William wondered, with a brief shudder—with his forceps, and tucked it into the wound.
As the woman wrapped her hand in a handkerchief, William deftly inserted himself at the head of the queue.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” William said politely, and bowed. “I am in search of Dr. Hunter. I have an important message for him.”
The doctor blinked, took off his glasses, and squinted at William, then put them back on and took up his knife again.
“He’s at Jockey Hollow today,” he said. “Probably at the Wick House, but might be among the cabins.”
“I thank you, sir,” William said, meaning it. The doctor nodded absently and beckoned to the next in line.
Another inquiry sent him uphill to Jockey Hollow, a rather mountainous area—Washington was damned fond of mountains—where a scene of immense devastation spread before him. It looked as though a meteor had struck a woodland, shattering trees and churning the soil. The Continentals had cut down what had to be at least a thousand acres of trees—the stumps poked ragged fingers out of the mud, and bonfires of discarded branches smoked throughout the camp, each one with a fringe of soldiers holding out frozen hands to the heat.
Logs were piled everywhere, in a rude order, and William saw that in fact, sizable cabins were being built. This was clearly going to be a semi-permanent encampment, and not a small one.
Soldiers, mostly in plain dress or with army greatcoats, swarmed like ants. If Denzell was in there, it would take no little time to winkle him out. He walked up to the nearest bonfire and nudged his way into the circle of men around it. God, the heat was wonderful.
“Where is the Wick House?” he inquired of the man next to him, rubbing his hands together to help spread the delicious warmth.
“Up there.” The man—a very young man, perhaps a few years younger than William—jerked his chin, indicating a modest-looking house in the distance, on the crest of a hill. He thanked the boy and regretfully left the fire, smelling strongly of smoke.
The Wick House, despite its modest size, was plainly the property of a wealthy man: there was a forge, a grain mill, and a sizable stable nearby. The wealthy man either was a rebel or had been forcibly evicted, for there were regimental flags planted near the door and a blue-nosed sentry outside, clearly there to weed out unwelcome visitors.
Well, it had worked once … William put his shoulders back, lifted his head, and walked up to the door as though he owned the place.
“I have a message for Dr. Hunter,” he said. “Will I find him here?”