Instruments of Darkness by Imogen Robertson Page A

command, and was known as a fair commander. Ready with his fists, but as ready to laugh and knock the air from a man’s lungs with a slap across the back. He needed only a wife to spoil and a son whom he could teach to shoot, to make himself content. Still, this letter to his father must be written. He began as follows:
    My Lord,

     

    I wish I had better news for you since our arrival in America. The situation of Boston is indeed pleasant - good, green, rolling country not unlike our own - so the provisions are plentiful and our men remain healthy and alert, for the most part, to their duty. There are some gentlemen in town with whom one would be happy to dine anywhere in the world, but the manners of the common sort show a strange lack of regard for rank. It is hard to put across. It is not the surliness of the London mob so much, but a rather more insidious habit of behaving as if we were all cut from the same stuff, if you take my meaning. By way of example - if eating outside the regiment, a fellow may serve you your food and sit down to conversation as if you had both just come in from the fields together. This lack of awareness of station and position in the ordinary sort of people must be the root, I believe, of the mood of rebellion that approaches like a contagion both from the countryside around us, and even within the town itself. The people are arming, and though they are in no way proper soldiers, and any but the largest force of them must be short work for a small company of His Majesty’s Own, they have begun to gather in great numbers and a dark mood. We may have to slaughter a fair number of them before they are willing to slink back to their farms. A sad state indeed, when the King’s subjects find themselves facing each other in such a situation.
    Thornleigh paused, and resumed staring at the wall again with a worried frown till a voice called from his door.

    ‘Thornleigh, drop your pen. No one can read a word you write anyway. I am ordered to see how the hospital arrangements are being managed. Will you come with me?’

    Hugh turned towards the voice with a ready smile. It was his friend Hawkshaw, so light and thin he seemed to have been wound together out of odd bits of rope. Thornleigh unfolded himself from his round-shouldered hunch over the letter, and placed on it his pen with the awkward delicacy of a bear attempting to arrange roses for a drawing room. Hawkshaw walked quickly across the room and peered over his shoulder at the page.

    ‘Did you never go to school, Thornleigh? My masters would have whipped me to shreds for having such a horrible hand.’

    Hugh grinned. ‘Old Lobster Grimes beat my hands till they bled. Funnily enough, it never made me write any better. I’ll come to the hospital with you, though I cannot let another packet sail without reporting to my father. He likes to claim first-hand intelligence in the House.’

    Hawkshaw grimaced. ‘Lord! Politics! Well, it may come to nothing as yet. We must be all civility and neatness and keep our powder dry. In the meantime, let us enjoy the air a little and look at all these pretty green hills and roads like travellers till we must watch them like soldiers.’

    ‘I did not come here to admire the country.’

    Hawkshaw did not reply, but looked out of the window into the quiet streets of the town. The trees planted at intervals along the wide and pleasant streets gave the whole an air of peace and solidity. A woman, her maid following close behind her, was walking by. She blushed a little to see the officer watching her, then with a smile, she looked back down at the path in front of her.

    ‘Ah, the fair ladies of this city,’ he murmured. ‘Yet she may slit my throat soon as lie with me, sell my pistols to the Minute Men and call herself a daughter of liberty.’ He turned back towards Thornleigh with a crooked grin. ‘Which is why I always visit the ladies of this town wearing my sword only, so as not to tempt their