Rachel hadn’t considered that either. Why not? She thought about it now, and didn’t like how much it unsettled her. “Nothing would have happened,” she said anyway. “It’s not as if I was planning to come back.”

Nathan’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. Wrapping his fingers around their opposing thumbs, he muttered a charm against the evil eye. Not the short Yiddish one she’d learned from her mother, but a long one with Hebrew parts. “Don’t say that! Why would you say that?”

Rachel sighed, annoyed both at his superstition and that she’d caught herself staring at his hands in the candlelight. “I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I’d live somewhere else afterwards, with a different name.”

He was uncharacteristically silent. “Oh,” he said at last. “I…” He swallowed. The bruise looked very dark against his cheek. “I would have given you a get.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him. “That would have made your mother too damn happy.” Mrs. Mendelson had been after Nathan to divorce Rachel since a year into their marriage, on grounds of barrenness.

Nathan winced at the profanity. His disapproval felt like a porcupine rolling over her skin. But Rachel was done trying to be a good wife. He wasn’t the center of her world and his simple assumption that he was—she wanted to shatter it.

“I wasn’t just running away from you. You were already a hundred miles away. I wanted to join the army. I needed to disappear and take a new name. If you’d given me a get, people would have expected to know where I went afterwards.”

“You didn’t take a new name,” he pointed out. “You took your maiden name back.”

“I see your hurt feelings come before everything, as always.”

“You should go,” he said abruptly. “If you don’t, I’ll start shouting and then all your hard work—how did you even do it? My mother said she washed your body—” He stopped short.

She wanted to throw the truth in his face. But somehow she did still shrink from hurting his feelings.

“My mother was in on it.”

She bit her lip.

He put his head in his hands. “Of course my mother was in on it.” His voice was muffled. “You should go.”

She wanted to stay and finish the argument. You’re not his wife anymore, she reminded herself. The siege is what matters. Your comrades need you. You can’t risk it. She rapped on the door.

A different member of the guard answered her summons. Hopefully Coburn was abashed and wouldn’t beat Nathan any more than he already had. She had one foot out the door when Nathan said, “Wait. You said something about eating? I’d love some food. I gave one of them money to buy me dinner and he never came back.”

Rachel’s fist clenched. She could have smashed it into Nathan or the sentry’s face with equal pleasure. “When I come back tomorrow,” she said, loudly enough that everyone in the guardhouse could hear her, “if I hear of one more instance of mistreatment or stealing, I will recommend an immediate court martial. Either give him back his money or give him what you bought with it.”

“The last thing we need is for him to be drunk too,” someone said behind her.

“I know he’s a pain in the ass,” she told them. “Believe me, I’ve known him for years. I know. I know he’s a spy, and a Loyalist, and that he never shuts up. But you are Continental soldiers. Have some goddamned discipline.”

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Nathan wince again at her taking the Lord’s name in vain. Damn him too. He’d been dining with Hessian officers in New York while she was starving in the army. Why should she feed him?

Angrily, she pulled the hunk of bread from her pocket. It gave beneath the pressure of her fingers, not even stale. The light infantrymen had been paid in cash on the march south, their first real wages in months. Her mess had had beef for dinner. Not enough beef—she still wanted the bread. But she marched over and slapped it down on Nathan’s pallet. “Let him eat it, Private. That’s an order.”

Nathan’s hands came away from his face. He looked up at her and opened his mouth. She fled before he could say anything someone might hear.

“Is Pilgrim’s Progress still available?” she heard him ask as the door shut behind her.

* * *

Pilgrim’s Progress was drivel. It was trash. It was an atrocity. Christians were awfully smug about how not only heathens and Jews and so forth but also most of their own friends were bound for hell, weren’t they?

That wasn’t the worst part, though. The worst part was how often the word “wise” appeared in the book. With the long printer’s s, it looked like: wiſe.

Every time Nathan saw it—every time—he thought it said wife. He still had a wife.

His candle was burning low. He would need to light a new one from it soon, before it burned out. A new flame couldn’t be lit on a holiday, and it was the first day of Sukkos.

The guards, shamed by his wife’s reproof yesterday, had actually brought him a little cheese and bread this morning. Fresh from the oven, so he shouldn’t have eaten it on a holiday, but it was probably baked by a Gentile—he abandoned the line of reasoning. A prisoner was permitted some lenience. Besides, it felt like every month this war dragged on made following the mitzvos harder and harder, and less vital too. A pleasant luxury for when you were safe at home surrounded by your friends. Why would HaShem want him to go hungry?

To prove to these goyim that being a Jew meant something, maybe. That it gave Nathan more strength in adversity than mere cheese and bread.

Showing off, then. HaShem did seem to like His followers showing off.

How many mitzvahs was Rachel breaking? She was wearing men’s clothes, to start, and maybe a forbidden mixture of wool and linen at that; she was working on Shabbos; she was lying; HaShem only knew what she was eating; she was taking His name in vain; she was probably taking her hat off indoors and showing her hair—

The candle guttered. He scrambled for the next one, but the windowless room was plunged into darkness before he could light it. Argh, he’d gotten distracted thinking about Rachel and the deep rich brown of her hair. He’d felt so special, back when they were married, when she’d started wearing caps and he’d been the only man she permitted to see her hair.

What did he mean, “back when they were married”? They were still married!

It’s not as if I was planning to come back, Rachel had said yesterday with perfect indifference.

He’d known she didn’t love him when he married her. Her mother was sick and someone had to pay for the doctor. But he hadn’t really loved her either; he’d just liked her enormously. Husbands and wives grew to love each other after the wedding. Not always, of course. But often enough. He’d assumed…he’d hoped…

He’d been desperately in love with her two years later, when the British occupied New York in ’76. It had been a wrench to send her and his mother to safety in Philadelphia while he stayed to protect his job and their little house.

Rachel had asked him to come with them! She’d asked him, and he’d been so flattered he almost went. He’d thought she felt something for him, beneath…everything. Apparently not. And he’d lost the house anyway in the Great Fire just a month later.

Many Loyalists were convinced that fleeing rebels had set the town on fire as the British marched in. Nathan thought it more likely that fires started easily in empty cities.

What hadn’t he lost since this war started? What was left?

Rachel, he reminded himself. That is, you definitely lost her. But she isn’t gone.

So many times he’d imagined her sick and scared and confused with fever, with no one to take care of her who loved her. No one to kiss her forehead or hold her hand or tell her she would make it through this, she just had to fight. He’d thought, Maybe if I’d been there…

But of course Rachel never needed anyone to tell her to fight. She was born fighting.

He’d wasted so much time longing to atone for the pain he’d imagined he caused her, and she’d never spared a single thought for his, if the look on her face when he mentioned her yahrzeit was any indication. All through last night, when he tried to sleep, he kept seeing that blank, surprised look.

Strange that she and his mother had finally found something to agree on: that their marriage didn’t matter at all.

He got to his feet, shuffled awkwardly and loudly across the room in his shackles, and pounded on the door. “Hey! I need a light for my candle. Has your fire been put out since yesterday evening?”

* * *

“…And he interrogated us for a quarter of an hour about when we lit our fire,” the sentry finished complaining. “How should I know? It was here this morning from the last watch.”

Rachel sighed. There was no point explaining to them about whatever holiday it must be; probably Nathan already had, in detail. “A quarter of an hour might be an exaggeration, don’t you think?”

“Not by enough,” another soldier muttered.

Nathan’s head jerked up when she came in. He was sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest, perching a book on his shackles. “Have you read Pilgrim’s Progress?” were the first words out of his mouth.

Since her battalion had been up most of the night, they had few urgent duties today, but she’d still put off visiting him until late afternoon, dreading what he would say. Planning her answers.

Instead, he said this. “Of course not. Why on earth would I read Pilgrim’s Progress?”

“Boredom, obviously. Desperation.” A British cannon boomed. His mouth spasmed. “This am haaretz Christian abandons his family—because that’s what good goyim do, evidently—so he can go to Heaven without them.”

You abandoned your family, she wanted to say. She crossed her arms silently.

“So he’s walking along on his way to Heaven,” Nathan continued, “and he meets this fellow, Mr. Worldly Wifeman—I mean Wiseman—who tells him that instead of…sorry, I’m not going to go back and explain the whole thing because it’s very boring, but I am going to tell you that Mr. Wiseman is from the town of Carnal Policy.”

The laugh burst from her tightly compressed lips.

He looked pleased with himself even as he wiped a drop of her spit off his cheek and twitched at another cannon blast. Don’t say anything, she told herself. Just don’t say anything.

“What?”

“Carnal Policy,” he repeated.

“That can’t be right.”

He knocked his candle into the straw pallet when he stood, clanking, to show her the book. Rachel righted the candle with a sigh, grinding out the sparks with her boot.

But there it was in black and white: Carnal Policy. “Oy, der goyim,” she muttered.

He laughed, the dark stubble on his jaw catching the light. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, even before his capture. She wondered if it bothered him; Nathan had been particular about a smooth face, even though he blushed and hung his head whenever the rabbi harangued his congregation about their shameful beardlessness.

But that was five years ago now. It didn’t feel like five years since she’d seen him. It felt like yesterday. It felt like he was her husband standing next to her and later they were going to share a bed.

She stepped away.

His smile faded. “Right. So Mr. Wiseman tells Christian that—”

“Wait. Christian is his name?”

He nodded. “He tells Christian that he doesn’t have to go through this tiny gate he’s been looking for, he can just go visit Mr. Legality and Mr. Civility, who live in Morality. And of course you know Mr. Wiseman must be a lying schemer trying to keep Christian out of Heaven, but I understand why Christian falls for it because legality, civility, and morality sound like a big improvement over my wife and children burning in a lake of fire to me.”

He paused for her to laugh. How dare he come back after five years and still expect her to laugh?

She wanted to, and that made it worse.

“So there’s an ugly high hill hanging over the path to Morality that our hero is worried will fall on his head. He’s going along in terror and flashes of fire start coming out of this dreadful menacing hill, and guess what this hill turns out to be?”

She shrugged.

“Mount Sinai.”

Her jaw dropped. “No.”

He dropped the book on the ground emphatically, and stepped on it.

“Mount Sinai isn’t a hill. It’s, it’s—” The truth was, she pictured Mount Sinai looking like the Palisades along the Hudson River, which presumably wasn’t close to the truth either. But—she knew it was beautiful.

“How can you live with them? They hate us,” Nathan said, an edge in his voice, and the moment of charity evaporated as if it had never been.

“Your mother hates me too, and you didn’t object to my living with her.”

“She doesn’t hate you. She’s just difficult. You of all people can’t condemn someone for that.”

“I of all—of all people—” Rachel sputtered.

“She wanted my marriage to bring her naches at Shearith Israel,” he said reasonably for the millionth time, “so she started out a little standoffish, and you never made a single attempt to win her over.”

Because it was simply a fact that marrying Rachel was a step down, so why should Mrs. Mendelson’s scorn offend her? “I don’t care who she wanted to impress at synagogue. I was your wife, and she was rude to me from the moment I met her. And you never did anything about it but tell me to ignore her.”

“If you had just had a little patience with her—”

“At our wedding she offered to take me to a dressmaker if I’d let her give my gown to the maid.”

She could see him wanting to say that his mother had meant it kindly. How could he not understand how much that had stung? Rachel had tried to look pretty. She’d been nineteen and grateful for his proposal and she’d done her best to be a credit to him. She had tried in the beginning—to be a good wife and a good daughter-in-law, to hold up her end of their bargain—and been rebuffed every time. Mrs. Mendelson hadn’t meant it kindly.

“So she made some petty remarks,” he said. “For that you turned our home into a battlefield? But I suppose that’s where you always wanted to be anyway.”

Rachel gritted her teeth. “She told you I was barren and you should divorce me. Plenty of women take a few years to conceive their first child!” She stopped herself before she started listing examples from Shearith Israel; she hated that the names still sprang to mind, after all this time.

Nathan threw up his hands. “Why are you even here.” His voice was flat. “Why visit me? Why have this conversation? I never even considered taking my mother’s ridiculous advice, but you…well. We both know what you did.”

As if him laughing and saying Ma, don’t be ridiculous meant the subject was closed and there was no reason to think about it further. “You sent me to Philadelphia with her. Alone. Are you really surprised I ran away after two years of her carping at me and moaning that my childbearing years were slipping away? ‘If you can even have children, dear.’”

“A year and a half,” he corrected her.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It was a year and a half,” he repeated, as if she actually hadn’t heard him instead of merely expressing incredulity at his ability to miss the point. “You left New York on the fifth of Elul in 1776 and you died”— another pause for the Hebrew incantation against the evil eye—“you ran away on the seventh of Shevat in 1778, so that’s a year and a half.”

Rachel had left their little insular world behind without looking back; she didn’t like the pang of loss she felt hearing Nathan mark time by Jewish dates. Sometimes she and Zvi managed to sort out when they were in the neighborhood of a holiday and maybe say a prayer or reminisce about home, and sometimes they didn’t. She’d tried to say Kaddish for her mother each year, hating that she wasn’t sure of the date.

“It’s a holiday today, isn’t it?” She hazarded a guess. “Sukkos?” That was the Festival of Booths, to remember the wandering in the wilderness after Egypt.

He grimaced. “The first day. I should be eating in the sukkah.” He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “Rachel, what do you want me to say? That I should have gone to Philadelphia with you when you asked? Are you telling me you’d have stayed if I did? You know, I thought…I thought maybe it was my fault you died. That if I’d been there, things might have gone differently. I kept asking my mother what the doctor said, and what you said, and were you afraid, and did you ask…”

He trailed off, but Rachel knew what he had been about to say. Did you ask for me?

“And when she didn’t answer, I wondered if the answers were too awful to burden me with. I’ve spent the last three and a half years wondering if I could have changed it! I refuse to do it all over again, not over this. We both know you didn’t really want me with you. I thought…I thought you might like some breathing room.”

“So you did know.” There was a roaring in her ears. Why, when everything else was gone, did this rage remain? She had wanted to be done with it, to leave it behind as surely as she’d left the lunar calendar and a life where eating outdoors seemed noteworthy.

“Why couldn’t you just admit it instead of pretending not to notice?” The words spilled up her throat from some ever-springing well inside her. “Instead of acting like it was a joke every time I said something unkind in the vain hope you would leave me alone for half a second. You kept practically begging me to like you, giving me presents and telling funny stories and fussing over my dinner plate. Why couldn’t you give me breathing room then, when we were living together, if you knew I wanted it?” She hadn’t wanted him to send her away to Philadelphia. She’d only wanted space to stop resenting him.

Too late now.

“I’m not good at that,” he said ruefully. So sure of his own charm. So sure she couldn’t stay angry. He’d always underestimated her.

“‘Did I ask for you,’” she mimicked. “Because that mattered more than anything, didn’t it? Oh, yes, I died a terrible death of yellow fever, but let’s ask the important question: was I thinking about you while I did it?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He looked so innocent and wounded when that was exactly what he’d meant, and Rachel’s anger burned so hot she spit out the one truth she had always swallowed. “I never wanted to marry you. Never. I did it to pay for Mamma’s doctors, and then…” Then Mamma died anyway, only a few months later.

“I know that,” he said, as if that somehow made it all right. “I didn’t mind, I thought—”

“I know what you thought. You thought you’d grow on me. You behaved as if we were really married, as if I were really your wife and you could comfort me.” She’d wanted it to be true too. She’d wanted so desperately to feel better and he’d tried and tried, but it was no use.

“The doctors said she’d recover.” Her eyes filled with tears, still longing for her mother after all these years. She remembered trying not to impose on the Mendelsons with her bottomless grief, to cry discreetly and not to mope around the house, because they were all she had now and she’d still felt like a guest in their home. “It was all for nothing,” she said viciously. “I made that great sacrifice for nothing.”

He looked stung at the word sacrifice. “I wanted to help you,” he said self-righteously. “Your mother was sick and I wanted to help you. We were really married. You said yes.”

Her gorge rose. “You wanted to help me? You wanted to fuck me!”

She’d never said that word to him before. They’d been shy and respectful to each other about everything to do with the marriage bed. It had been months before she could even bring herself to explain where he needed to touch her down there. He’d apologized, and they both cried. They’d been ludicrously young.

She was a soldier now and said “fuck” all the time, but she still felt shocking and ashamed.

He swallowed, tried to take a step back, and almost tripped over his shackles. “Well. That too.”

* * *

Nathan stood there, ankles smarting and bruised, pickled in the same sick shame he’d felt on their wedding night. He’d known she wasn’t really enjoying herself, not the way she should have been, but he didn’t know how to ask her about it, he’d never done this before either and he barely knew her, so he just kept trying and everything he tried, everywhere he put his mouth and his hands, made him harder and her shyer. Yes, he’d wanted to fuck her.

They’d figured that part out eventually. The rest of it, they’d never figured out.

He’d never meant to take advantage of her. He was a little older, but not by much: twenty-three to her nineteen. And he’d been a good match. Not a brilliant one, whatever his mother thought, but he’d had a steady job and a house and a kind face and her mother had liked him. Rachel had said yes, and he’d thought…

He hadn’t thought that meant Yes, I’ll make an enormous sacrifice. He’d thought it meant Yes, I’ll be your wife.

“Were you only pretending to like me? At the beginning. I thought you liked me.”

She crossed her arms. “I liked you well enough,” she said reluctantly, and then threw up her hands. “And there you go again! Think about my feelings for once. Think about something other than whether people like you. It made it worse that I liked you, that you were nice to me, that I wanted you in my bed. I couldn’t even be properly angry. I couldn’t feel justified in resenting you. All I could feel was more and more awful, like my life was an apple slowly going rotten and I couldn’t stop it.”

She smoothed her regimental coat over her hips and straightened her spine soldier-fashion, as if reminding herself she had a new life now, a better one. As if it comforted her to remember she’d tossed their life together onto the slop heap like a rotten apple, and walked away from it.

He’d tried so hard to be a good husband. He’d never reproached her for being cold or snappish or disagreeing with him about politics in public. Now she told him that was an unforgivable crime too: Why couldn’t you just admit it instead of pretending not to notice?

“I don’t know why I’m even talking to you,” she said. The words slipped between his ribs like a bayonet, cold and sharp. “What can you understand about wanting independence? All you ever wanted was for the British to make everyone behave themselves, like children. You can’t even stand up to your mother.”

“That’s not fair. Wanting legality and civility isn’t childish,” he said hotly, even though he liked the British much less now. He and Rachel had done this a thousand times and he still knew all the words. “Peace isn’t childish. How many people have already died for independence?”

He ran over what she’d said again. “Wait! Am I the British in this analogy? As in, you heroically claimed your freedom from my tyrannical rule?” No, because he was a nebekh who couldn’t stand up to his mother. “No, wait, my mother is the British, and I’m…Canada?”

“I want freedom for us more than I want to live.” She was talking about literal American independence now. She’d breezed past the trifle of his existence, and moved on to the important things. “Aren’t you tired of us always being simply Jews, no matter where we live? We’re never English or Spanish or Polish. I wouldn’t call myself a Pole if you paid me, but my family lived there for generations.”

What’s wrong with being a Jew? he wanted to ask, but for once he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to hear her answer. Not today.

“I want to be American,” she said. “Goyim think they’re governed without representation! There isn’t a single Jew allowed into Parliament, or even to vote for Parliament. Jews aren’t even British citizens. Their army hasn’t got one Jewish officer who didn’t convert to take his commission. Ours does,” she said proudly.

He snorted. “And you think I pretend not to notice things! How many of your Jewish officers have been court-martialed for suspect loyalties?”

That brought her up short, but only for a moment. “If you mean Colonel Franks, anyone who was Benedict Arnold’s closest aide-de-camp would have come under suspicion, and he was completely exonerated. Anyway, I didn’t say it would be easy, or quick. Things don’t have to be easy if they’re worth a hard fight. But you wouldn’t understand that. You’re a coward and you—”

She brought herself up short, suddenly. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “That wasn’t fair. I shouldn’t dredge up all this old history when you’re— You’ve held up really well in here.”

“Coward” stung: there it was, what she’d always believed. She had chutzpah, to say that to him. He wasn’t the one who’d run off like a thief in the night so he wouldn’t have to talk to her! But “old history”—that was far, far worse.

Had she thought of him once in the last three and a half years?

“I’m going to petition your court-martial for clemency,” she promised, her voice tight. “I’ll—I’ll talk to Colonel Hamilton. He has Washington’s ear, everyone says. We don’t always hang spies. If you give your parole—”

“I’m not a coward,” he said tightly. “Well, all right, I am a coward, but I work around that. I’m not a spy. Or—I am a spy, but not for the British. I’ve been supplying the British army and then passing information about their numbers and whereabouts to Washington. That’s why I was here yesterday morning, to meet with the general about the state of things in Yorktown.”