When Creighton was younger and indulged in frequent displays of temper, a physician had blamed it on a surfeit of blood and recommended regular bloodletting. They had had to hold Creighton down to perform the procedure. Afterward his limbs had felt so weak and useless that he could scarcely stand, but he had forced himself to, just to show them that he couldn’t be ruled so easily.
His limbs felt the same now—as though all the strength had drained from them. But he forced himself forward and bent to examine the prisoner’s face. It wasn’t the same face he remembered. The cheeks were sunken; the blue eyes were nearly hidden behind drooping eyelids; the sallow skin was marred by open sores. Still, it was familiar enough to make his heart leap with hope. He could scarcely bear to say the word in his mind, for fear the man would deny it: “Father?”
The prisoner turned his dull gaze on Creighton. “Who?”
Fighting back tears, Creighton clutched the man’s hand and shook it, like a small child desperate to get a parent’s attention. “It’s me, Father!” he said, in a voice so thick and strange he hardly recognized it as his own. “It’s Creighton!”
“Creighton?” the man whispered, and his eyes widened in recognition, or disbelief. “Here?”
The moment was shattered by a hollow booming sound that filled the cell. Creighton spun about to see that the heavy door had swung closed. Arnold strode across the cell and shouted through the small opening in the door, “Guard! Open this at once!”
The commandant’s face appeared in the opening. He no longer appeared eager or solicitous. “What?” he said, in mock surprise. “You didn’t find the man you were seeking?”
“No. I’d like to examine the other cells.”
“I’m afraid it would prove entirely fruitless, since your General Washington isn’t here. He’s in the graveyard, buried beneath a plain wooden cross. You see, he was hanged, not long after his arrival here.”
Arnold thrust one hand through the opening, reaching for the captain’s throat. The man stepped nimbly aside and, seizing Arnold’s wrist, rammed it viciously against the side of the opening. “Who sent you here?” he demanded.
Though Arnold’s face was distorted by pain, he managed to make his voice indignant and imperious. “Governor Chester, you imbecile! And he’ll have you flogged and stripped of your rank for this!”
The captain released his hold on Arnold’s wrist. “The governor is well aware of Washington’s fate, since he ordered it. Why would he send you to fetch a dead man?”
“He didn’t indicate whether we’d find Washington dead or alive, he merely said to bring him back, and I intend to do so.”
“And I intend to keep you safely locked up until I can determine the truth of the matter. I’m sure the governor won’t mind waiting a few more days. After all, Washington won’t be going anywhere.” He gave a smug smile. “And neither will you.” His face disappeared from the opening.
Arnold raised one foot and delivered a kick that made the door rattle in its frame. Then he turned away and began pacing about the room, rubbing his injured forearm. “A pox on the man! Why did we have to encounter the one British officer in a thousand who thinks for himself?”
Creighton sank down on the bunk next to his father and put his aching head in his hands. “I’m sorry, Father. We should have freed you; instead, it looks as though we’ll join you.”
For a moment Harry Brown didn’t respond; he seemed not to have heard. Then slowly, hesitantly, like someone recalling an old habit long forgotten and long unpracticed, he raised his arm and laid it tentatively across his son’s shoulders. “You did your best,” he murmured.
Creighton leaned into him, and for the first time since he’d learned of his father’s supposed death two years before, he let a breach open in the wall of anger and insolence he had built to contain the grief, the way the earthen wall at New Orleans held back the river, and the tears found their way through, in a trickle at first, then in a rush.
When the flood of emotion began to ebb, Creighton replaced it with a deluge of questions that, as it soon became obvious to him, his father was unable to answer. In his relief at seeing Harry Brown alive, Creighton had overlooked the fact that the man was desperately ill. One moment he was sweating and flushed with fever, the next he was gripped by chills so violent that his teeth chattered.
“Malaria, I have no doubt,” said Arnold. “I wonder if they’ve given him Peruvian bark.” He strode to the door again and shouted for the guard, but there was no response.
“We have to get him out,” Creighton said, “and very soon.”
“I know that. If you have any suggestions as to how, I’d be glad to hear them.” Arnold dragged the desk beneath the window and, standing atop it, examined the iron bars. “They’re well rusted, and the mortar is crumbling in places, but it would take several days to work one loose, even if we had a tool to work with.” The general stepped down and pushed the desk back to its place.
Creighton dug into his coat pocket and came up with the small dagger, which had escaped the guard’s notice. “Prepare for the worst, remember?” he said wryly. He handed the knife to Arnold, who tested its point.
“This should do. We’ll have to wait until after dark to try it, though.”
Between bouts of chills and fever, Harry Brown experienced fairly lengthy lucid spells. Though his body and his voice were weak, he managed some brief bits of conversation. When Creighton told him how he’d been treated by his uncle, and how the colonel had met his end, his father said, “Don’t judge him too harshly. When I was court-martialed for ‘aiding the enemy,’ he spoke up in my defense. It was his intervention that saved me from the rope.”
“But why did he lie to us, and say you’d died in battle?”
“To spare you the shame of knowing that I was a traitor, I suppose.”
“I wouldn’t have been ashamed.”
His father smiled faintly. “You say that now. But you’ve changed. I’ll wager that your mother would see things differently, eh?”
Creighton nodded reluctantly. “Still, she’ll be glad to learn that you’re alive.”
Harry Brown gave a feeble laugh that dissolved into a fit of coughing. “Barely,” he said at last.
Creighton swallowed hard and forced himself to look confident. “We’ll find a way out of here, and we’ll take you with us.”
“Good.” He patted Creighton’s hand with his own, which was nearly as clammy and rough as the stones of the cell. “But I want you to promise me something: When that time comes, if I’m too weak to travel, you’re to go without me. I want your word on it.”
Uncertain how to reply, Creighton glanced at Arnold. The general nodded slightly. “You have my word,” Creighton said.
As soon as the square of sky turned dark, they shoved the desk under the window again and took turns chipping with the dagger at the mortar around the base of the bars. On the outside, the window lay at ground level. It looked out on the parade ground, which was surrounded by a high stone wall. Every few yards or so there was an opening in the wall through which the barrels of cannon protruded, aiming at the bay. Above the cannon ports was a wooden walkway, where two sentries circled the perimeter in opposite directions. Every quarter hour or so, one of the sentries came so near their window that they had to leave off working until he was out of earshot.
By the time they had dug out the mortar to a depth of an inch or so, Creighton’s hands were aching and his palms were blistered. When Arnold took his place at the window, he climbed down and sagged onto the chair. “This will take forever,” he groaned. “What are we going to do?”
“Be quiet!” Arnold whispered. “Listen!”
Creighton climbed up next to him and put one ear to the window. “I don’t hear anything.”
“Exactly. No sentry. It’s been more than a quarter hour since the last one.”
“Perhaps they’re just changing the watch.”
“No. The Brits invariably divide the watch into four-hour shifts. They changed less than two hours ago.”
“Look!” Creighton pointed to an indistinct form moving toward them, nearly invisible in the shadows at the base of the wall.
“I don’t see anything,” Arnold said.
The shape disappeared, and Creighton began to think that he’d only imagined it. Then he heard a faint voice from somewhere outside. “Creighton? General Arnold?”
Arnold grasped the bars as though he meant to pull them out bare-handed. “Peter! Over here!”
A moment later Peter’s great form blocked out the sky. “Thank God! When you didn’t come back, I thought something must’ve gone wrong. Looks like I was right.”
“How did you get inside the walls?” Arnold asked.
“With a rope and a grappling hook.”
“I hope you brought weapons.”
“I took the muskets from the sentries—after I’d clobbered ’em, of course.”
“Hand them through.”
“I’ve got a better idea, sir. Stand back.” Abruptly, he vanished from sight again.
“What’s he up to?” Creighton wondered.
“I’m not sure,” Arnold said as he descended from the desk. “But you’d best do as he says.”
Puzzled, Creighton peered between the bars, searching for some sign of Peter. There was a sudden rumbling sound, like thunder, and a moment later an immense black shape came lumbering out of the dark, heading straight for him. With a cry, he stumbled backward, off the edge of the desk, and landed painfully on his backside on the stones.
Like a crack of lightning following the thunder, there was a tremendous clash of iron on iron. The bars that blocked the window sprang free from their sockets; one flew across the cell, narrowly missing Creighton’s head.
The square of charcoal-colored sky was blotted out momentarily by an even darker cylindrical shape. Then, with a screech of metal, it withdrew from the opening, to be replaced by Peter’s head. “Come on!” he called. “Hurry!”
Creighton heard a clamor of footsteps and voices from the corridor. It wouldn’t take the guards long to determine which cell had been broken into. He snatched up the bar that had nearly impaled him, thrust one end between the stones of the floor, and jammed the other end against the door.
Arnold had already scrambled through the window, and was holding out a hand to him. “Quickly!”
“Wait!” Creighton lunged to the bunk and yanked his father’s shivering form into a sitting position.
“No!” his father protested feebly. “Leave—” But his words were cut off, along with his breath, as Creighton thrust one shoulder into the man’s midsection, lifted him from the bunk, and staggered toward the window.
Though Harry Brown’s wasted frame was lighter than he had expected, Creighton couldn’t manage to hoist both himself and his father onto the desk. “Help me, here!” he called out breathlessly.
“I’ve got him!” Peter’s voice replied, and a second later the burden of his father’s body was pulled from his back and through the window. Before Creighton could muster the strength to follow, he heard the rattle of the guard’s key in the lock, and then the sound of something heavy pounding on the door. “The devil!” someone shouted. “They’ve wedged it shut!”
Spurred on by fear, Creighton clambered onto the desk and thrust his torso through the opening. “Halt!” ordered a voice behind him. Creighton’s feet scrabbled at the stones, unable to find a purchase. Peter took hold of his arms, but before he could pull Creighton free, the guard had thrust his pistol through the opening in the door and fired. Creighton cried out as something struck his left leg, sending pain coursing through it.
As effortlessly as though Creighton were a child, Peter hauled him out onto the ground. As Arnold helped him to his feet, Creighton said, almost apologetically, “I’m shot.”
“Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
Peter slung Harry Brown over one shoulder like a sack of grain and headed for the wall. “We’ll have to get out the same way I got in.”
Hobbling after him, Creighton nearly collided with the cannon that Peter had used as a battering ram. Normally two men and a set of pulleys were required to maneuver a gun that size, but Peter had somehow managed not only to move it but to get it rolling with enough force to break through the bars. Creighton shook his head and thanked the heavens that the giant was on their side.
They clambered up the steps to the wooden walkway. Peter halted, looking around uncertainly. “Now where’s that rope?” he muttered.
Across the parade ground, the door to the barracks burst open and a dozen half-clothed soldiers stumbled out, carrying lanterns and muskets. “You’d best find it quickly,” Arnold said.
Peter groped along the top of the battlements with one hand, searching for the grappling hook. “It’s here somewhere, it’s here somewhere.”
Creighton saw the flash of muskets from the ground below, like giant fireflies. An instant later he heard the reports; a ball ricocheted off the stones a foot away from him. Frantically he began running his hands along the wall, too, until they struck something metal. “Here it is!”
“Go on over!” Arnold told him.
“I can’t! My leg!”
The general strode to him and, bending over, clasped his hands together. “Give me your foot.”
Creighton raised his good leg and planted his foot in the general’s hands. Arnold heaved him upward. With a shout of pain Creighton flung the wounded leg over the top of the wall, seized the rope, and half slid, half climbed down the outside of the wall. When he hit the ground, his leg crumpled beneath him and he went rolling down the slope. By the time he stopped himself and got to his feet, Arnold had reached the ground and Peter was descending the rope, still with Harry Brown draped across his broad back.
More musket flashes lit up the embrasures on the battlements above them. They scrambled downhill toward the bay, musket balls whining around them, sounding so much like mosquitoes—particularly large and deadly ones—that Creighton, out of old habit, flung his arms about, trying to wave them away.
He and Peter piled into the dinghy. While Arnold pushed them off, Creighton took up the oars. The moment Arnold was aboard, he began pulling for the sloop as though their lives depended on it—which they well might. As they were hoisting the dinghy over the rail of the ship, he heard an outbreak of thumping and clattering from the shore. “They’re sending a boat after us!” he shouted.
“Raise the anchor, quickly,” Arnold said.
After stretching Harry Brown out on the deck, Peter hurried forward to help Creighton with the heavy cast-iron anchor. Arnold set about raising the sails, but there was barely a breath of wind to fill them. “We’ll never get under way in time!” Peter said. He lunged to the swivel gun that was mounted in the bow, then turned back, arms spread helplessly. “I’ve got no gunner’s match to fire it with!”
Creighton peered over the rail. A longboat filled with soldiers from the fort was skimming toward them, only fifty yards away and closing in fast. “We’ll have to fight them off!” he said grimly, and drew the small dagger, which was now dull from digging out mortar.
“I’ve got a better weapon than that!” Peter bent, took hold of the massive anchor, and with one heave, hoisted it over his head. As the longboat pulled alongside them, he stepped to the rail and flung the anchor overboard. With shouts of dismay, the sailors scattered. The anchor plummeted past them and crashed through the bottom of their boat. A plume of water went up, like the spume from a blowing whale.
Several of the sailors leaped for the gunwales of the sloop; Creighton and Peter quickly dispatched them with belaying pins. The rest dived into the water and swam for shore.
With every inch of sailcloth raised, they managed to come about and drift toward the mouth of the bay. Though their progress was agonizingly slow, by the time a British gunboat had hoisted its huge sails and set out after them, they were in the open ocean and heading for home.