The Once and Future Spy Read Online Free Page B

“I’m all for heading back.”
    Nate shook his head stubbornly. He had never seen a man executed, but he figured it was something he ought to know about.
     All the rebel officers fought with halters around their necks. Nate had torn out from the New York
Weekly Post Boy
the article describing the sentence imposed by a British judge on an Irish rebel. “You are to be hanged by the neck,” the
     judge had informed the condemned man, “but
not
until you are dead; for while you are still living your body is to be cut down, your bowels torn out and burned before your
     face, your head cut off, and your body divided into four quarters, your head and quarters to be at the King’s disposal; and
     may the Almighty God have mercy on your soul.”
    It was on the bowling green that Nate first spotted the Commander-in-Chief. He was chatting with his portly Commander of Artillery,
     General Knox. Nate had never set eyes on the Commander-in-Chief before, but he recognized him instantly. He was a heavy man,
     easily a head taller than anyone around him, with thick thighs and meaty hips and high cheekbones and a prominent nose. A
     black cockade jutted from the brim of his hat, indicating he was a general officer. He wore his hair powdered and tied back
     at the neck with a red ribbon, indicating he was a gentleman. He sat his horse as if he had been born on one.
    The Commander-in-Chief was not someone Nate was predisposed to. He had heard too many unpleasant stories about him: how he
     had been a land speculator back in Virginia; how he had married a rich widow for her money; how he had advertised in newspapers
     to recapture a runaway slave but had kept his name off the advertisement; how he had turned up, conspicuous in his officer’s
     uniform, when Congress was deciding on a Commander-in-Chief even though he hadn’t drilled a militia unit in fifteen years.
     It was whispered about that the tallVirginian wanted to be an American king, and Nate half believed it. On top of everything, he was clearly an amateur when it
     came to military matters; faced with an enemy expeditionary force that was said to number thirty-two thousand regulars (if
     you counted the mercenaries), the Virginian had committed the blunder of dividing his army, which numbered about twenty thousand
     and included a high percentage of inexperienced militiamen. It didn’t take a genius to understand that the military situation
     was desperate. But the Virginian, whose only experience came from some skirmishing in the forests of the Ohio during the Seven
     Years’ War, seemed oblivious to reality.
    Now I’ll do the execution:
    A NERVOUS CLEARING OF A DRY THROAT here; the author squirms at executions, even when they take place in the imagination.)
    A company of black-shirted Pennsylvania riflemen, and another of “shirtmen”—Virginia frontiersmen wearing fringed buckskin
     shirts and armed with long rifles so accurate it was said they could hit a target that a New England boy had to squint at
     to see—were drawn up on the green. Those who had hats wore them against the sun. A crude gibbet had been constructed not far
     from the statue of Farmer George (he normally had a Roman numeral III after his name) on a prancing horse. A thick rope neatly
     tied into a noose dangled from the gibbet. The muffled beat of the kettledrum faltered as an open-sided dray appeared on the
     Broad Way end of the green. The drummer boy, staring at the dray, had forgotten what he was there for. An officer kicked him
     in the ass. The drumbeat started up again.
    The dray was pulled onto the green by two beady-eyed oxen that kept their heads down in their yokes and drooled onto the cobblestones.
     Half a dozen armed shirtmen walked on either side of the dray. Nate noticed their rifles were fitted with bayonets and wondered
     where they had gotten them. Standing on the dray, his arms tied behind his back at the wrists, was Sergeant T. Hickey, until
     recently a member of the