Infernal Revolutions

  I tried to speak and hug her, but could not. Instead Sophie hugged and kissed me with such force that I was almost toppled backwards in the snow. Then, sensing something amiss, Sophie stopped and looked around suspiciously.

  ‘What are you doing here on your own? Have they been mistreating you?’

  Even had I been able to speak I would not have snitched – I was alive after all, when many a better spy than me had been done to death with great venom. Instead, I shook my head vigorously, so that snow flew off it, and cracked, literally, my broadest smile. I had survived, and I was loved!

  To thaw out, I was taken to the nearest abandoned Loyalist house, which Sophie had appropriated thanks to the myriad of special permits she had accumulated from the top Revolutionary generals. There I had the most sublime sleep – closely followed by the most sublime bath – of my entire life. All the while, Sophie fussed around me as though I were next in line to George Washington, so that I was restored to humanity in a very quick time. I felt guilty about eating the owner’s food and wearing his clothes, but Sophie said not to be; he in turn, assuming he wasn’t caught and hung, would be provided with everything he needed by a fellow Loyalist, because that was the reciprocal way American society worked.

  Knowing that we would only have a short time in the house before we were asked or forced to move on, I took the opportunity, while Sophie was cooking and singing in the kitchen, to reflect upon the extraordinary events of the last six months, and how they had changed my life for good. From being a callow youth who knew nothing about the world, I now knew perhaps more than I cared to. Amongst other things, I had survived an Atlantic crossing, I had suffered the pangs of unrequited love, I had experienced requited love, I had done it, I had married, I had been a spy, I had been hunted by a murderer, I had seen men murder and be murdered, I had experienced the thrill and horror of the battlefield, I had been in prison, I had narrowly escaped hanging, I had seen the consequences of religious mania, I had met sinners and saints, I had shot a man, I had seen nature at its wildest, I had met men whose deeds would be spoken about until the end of time, I had conversed with idiots and geniuses, and I had performed one heroic act amidst a plethora of cowardly ones. Truly, experience was now slopping out of my ears, but what was to be done with it, and was I any happier for having acquired it?

  My original aim – to hammer this experience into poetic gold back in Brighthelmstone – was now an impossibility in its pristine form for the main reason that I could not even get back to Brighthelmstone. This was a prime example of how little regard I had paid to the well-known fact that Actions have Consequences. Once dived in, I now realized, The River of Life was hard to get out of, and its currents led one in directions so unforeseen as to be almost comical. As for being happier – well, I was in some ways and not in others. I felt enlarged by the enjoyable experiences, such as meeting Sophie and my act of heroism at Nassau Hall, but diminished by the many more bad ones, which had battered my pride and severely shaken my perception of myself. In short, the price of honey had been high, and I had paid for it with a thousand stings whose mental scars would always be with me.

  But the main thing, I supposed, was not whether these experiences were good or bad, but whether they contained enough poetic fuel to generate a masterpiece in the future, assuming I could find the space and time to write one in America? Surely they did, but how long would I have to wait for the memory of them to ripen, given that the events were too recent and too raw for me to write about them now? Would they even mature before I died?

  It was all most perplexing, but the falling snow outside my bedroom window soothed me into an acceptance of life, whatever it offered. I was alive, I had survived, and I should be grateful. In which melting mood, I took pen, paper and ink from the owner’s bedside desk, and scribbled letters to my parents, Amanda Philpott and Nutmeg Nell, telling them briefly what had happened to me, and why they need not worry about me even though they would never see me again on this earth. Once done, I sealed them up and settled back on my pillow for a good salty exile’s cry, the tears of which were dried only by the arrival of a sublime horsemeat sandwich with mustard and dill.

  It was to be another week before the umbilical cord with England was well and truly cut. With Sophie and a couple of thousand other Rebels by my side, I oversaw the return of The Glorious 85th to their lines. Pushing my letters into Thomas Pomeroy’s hand for safe delivery, we parted at a winter crossroads. I said my farewells and watched them march away, drums and fifes playing, towards the eastern horizon, bound ultimately for an England that from now on would exist only in my memory and imagination.

  ‘Not a bad set of boys,’ I said tearfully, when they were no more than a tiny red smear on a vast white landscape.

  ‘No,’ agreed Sophie, clutching my arm, ‘but boys they remain. You, my dear, have become a man.’

  This was another remark to ponder, but if it was true, was it better to be a sad man than a happy boy? I looked around at the beautiful yet somehow desolate countryside – not a coffee house, piazza, inn, folly, rotunda, Italianate garden or any other grown-up solace in sight – and thought not. Then, to compound my increasing melancholy, I glanced down at Sophie and noticed the messianic look in her eyes as she gazed southwards. Inwardly shrieking, I wondered if the net result of my quest for experience had been the mere exchange of a mad English woman for a mad American one; but even if this were the case, ‘twas too late to do much about it now – I was destined for Philadelphia, fatherhood and greatness, whether I liked it or not.