“Contagion,” I said. “Of course. Smallpox would spread like wildfire in a crowded encampment.”

“Discipline was a problem, too,” Marcus said. “Nobody followed orders, unless Washington himself gave them. And I wasn’t the only young man who’d run away from home seeking adventure. For every runaway who enlisted, though, it seemed that two men deserted. There was so much coming and going that nobody could keep track of who was there and who wasn’t, or which regiment you belonged to, or where you’d come from.”

“Did you go to Albany, like Joshua suggested?” I asked.

“Yes,” Marcus said, “but the army wasn’t there. They’d gone east, to Manhattan and Long Island.”

“So that’s when you joined the medical corps.” I was eager to put together the fragments of what I knew.

“Not quite. First, I joined up with a company of gunners. I had been traveling at night for more than a month. I was alone, spooked like a newborn colt whenever anybody spoke to me, and utterly convinced I would be caught and hauled back to Massachusetts to answer for my father’s death,” Marcus explained. “The Philadelphia Associators took me in without any questions. It was my first rebirth.”

But not his last.

“I had a new father—Lieutenant Cuthbert—and brothers instead of sisters. I even had a new mother of sorts.” Marcus shook his head. “German Gerty. Lord, I haven’t thought of her for decades. And Mrs. Otto. Christ, she was formidable.”

Marcus’s expression darkened.

“But there were still so many rules, and so much death. And precious little freedom,” he continued, before falling silent.

“Then what happened?” I prompted.

“Then I met Matthew,” Marcus said simply.

Washington Papers, United States National Archives

George Washington to Dr. William Shippen Jr.

Morristown, New Jersey

6 February 1777

Dear Sir:

Finding the Small pox to be spreading much and fearing that no precaution can prevent it from running through the whole of our Army, I have determined that the troops shall be inoculated. This Expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but yet I trust in its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require the measure, for should the disorder infect the Army in the natural way and rage with its usual virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the Sword of the Enemy. . . . If the business is immediately begun and favoured with the common success, I would fain hope they will be soon fit for duty, and that in a short space of time we shall have an Army not subject to this the greatest of all calamities that can befall it when taken in the natural way.

15

Dead

JANUARY–MARCH 1777

Marcus looked down the barrel of the rifle he had taken at Bunker Hill, toward the head of George III. The image was mounted to a distant tree with the point of a broken bayonet.

“Eyes or heart?” Marcus asked his audience, squinting as he took aim.

“You’ll never hit it,” a soldier scoffed. “He’s too far away.”

But Marcus was an even better shot now than he had been when he’d taken his father’s life.

The face of the king transformed itself into the face of his father.

Marcus pulled the trigger. The gun cracked into life, and bark flew. When the smoke cleared, there was a hole right between King George’s eyes.

“Take your best shot, lads.” Adam Swift walked around the crowd with his cap like an entertainer at a fair. He was Irish, wicked, clever—and a source of amusement to half the colonial army, with his songs and pranks. “A halfpenny will buy you a chance to kill the king. Do your bit for liberty. Make Georgie pay for what he’s done.”

“I want to go next!” cried a fourteen-year-old Dutch rigger named Vanderslice who had run away from a ship newly arrived in Philadelphia and joined up with the Associators soon after.

“You haven’t got a gun,” Swift pointed out.

Marcus was just about to loan Vanderslice his when two uniformed officers came into view.

“What is the meaning of this!” Captain Moulder, the nominal head of the Philadelphia Associators, surveyed the scene with disapproval. Lieutenant Cuthbert, a rawboned man in his midtwenties of Scottish extraction, was at his side.

“Just some harmless fun, sir,” Cuthbert said, glaring at Marcus and Swift.

Cutherbert’s assurances might have satisfied the captain, had Moulder not spotted King George.

“Did you take that from a picture in the college at Princeton?” Captain Moulder demanded. “Because if you did, the college would like it back.”

Swift pressed his lips together and Marcus stood at attention.

“Captain Hamilton claimed he damaged the painting, sir,” Cuthbert said, diverting the possible blame onto someone better able to withstand it. “Shot a cannonball straight through the canvas.”

“Hamilton!” Vanderslice was disgusted. “He had nothing to do with it, Cuthbert. It was the three of us who cut it out of the frame.”

This was precisely what Captain Moulder had feared.

“In my tent. Now. All three of you!” Moulder barked.

* * *

—

MARCUS STOOD IN FRONT of Captain Moulder, with Swift and Vanderslice on either side. Lieutenant Cuthbert stood at the entrance to the tent, keeping the rest of the regiment safely out of range of the captain’s wrath, though within earshot. Cuthbert was greatly beloved. He refused to put up with any nonsense from the men in his charge while ignoring most of the instructions given to him by his superior officers. It was an ideal style of leadership for the Continental army.

“I should have you all flogged,” Captain Moulder said. He held up the limp piece of canvas with the defaced image of their former ruler. “What on earth persuaded you to take it?”

Vanderslice looked at Marcus. Swift looked at the ceiling.

“We wanted to use it for target practice. Sir,” Marcus replied, looking Moulder in the eye. He struck Marcus as a bully, and Marcus had some experience with them. “It was my doing. Vanderslice and Swift tried to stop me.”

Vanderslice’s mouth gaped open in astonishment. This was not at all what had happened. At Princeton, Marcus had climbed up on Swift’s shoulder and used a British bayonet taken from the battlefield to behead the portrait of the king. Vanderslice had encouraged him every step of the way.

Swift shot Marcus an approving glance.

“And who the hell are you?” Moulder’s eyes narrowed.

“Mar—Galen Chauncey.” Marcus still tended to blurt out his baptismal name when under stress.

“We call him Doc,” Vanderslice volunteered.

“Doc? You’re not from Philadelphia. And I don’t remember signing you up,” Moulder replied.

“No. That was me, Captain.” Cuthbert lied with breezy assurance, the mark of someone skilled at fabrication. “Distant cousin. From Delaware. He’s a good shot. Thought he could be useful manning a musket in case the cannon were overrun.”

This tale of Marcus’s origins was complete fiction, but it served to quiet the captain—at least about how he’d become a part of Moulder’s regiment.

Moulder spread the piece of canvas wide. There was little left of the face of George III. The eyes were gone, the mouth was nothing more than a gaping hole, and the monarch’s powdered hair was peppered with shot.

“Well, at least one thing you’ve told me is true,” Moulder admitted. “The boy is a good shot.”

“Doc saved my life at Princeton,” Swift said. “Put a ball right through the eye of a British soldier. And he doctored the lieutenant’s hand when he burned it. Useful boy to have around, sir.”

“And these?” Moulder picked up two brass semicircles, finely engraved, that had been found in Marcus’s haversack when the captain searched it for other spoils of battle. “Don’t tell me they’re medical instruments.”

“Quadrants,” Swift replied. “Or they will be when we’re through with them.”

In addition to the head of George III, Marcus had taken the two pieces from the orrery that stood outside the room where he’d found the king’s portrait. Other soldiers had smashed the glass and part of the fine mechanism that marked the passage of the planets across the sky. He had pocketed what remained because it reminded him of his mother, and home.