Chapter 6
Yara's hooves clattered noisily in the cold stillness as Gretchen guided Anna's chestnut mare through Trenton's dark streets. She hunched over the horse's neck, shielding her face from the bitter wind that blew up from the river.
Yara knew the way to the ford west of the village, so Gretchen could think without focusing on where the horse was going.
And what she thought about — what she couldn't avoid thinking about, no matter how much she wanted to — was David, dead at the base of Breed's Hill after the Boston militia had retreated in the face of a third wave of Redcoats.
David had gone out the night before with other men from Charlestown to fortify the hill and prepare the cannon they hoped would finally lift the siege of the harbor.
They were in high spirits, flushed from the victories at Concord and Lexington and sure they had the British Empire on the run.
What the Redcoats had in guns and men surely could not compare with what the Americans had in courage and nerve.
"I'll be home for supper," David had said as he left that night, giving Gretchen a peck on the cheek while his comrades waited for him in the alley behind their house. "Have the roast beef ready, and some extra bottles of beer — it's going to be a hot day of digging!"
But, of course, David wasn't home for dinner.
He didn't come home for another two days, wrapped in a linen shroud stained with his life's blood, and he stayed in the front parlor only long enough to be carried to the churchyard.
The bottles of beer Gretchen had retrieved from the cellar in anticipation of his return were smashed to pieces on the cobblestones after she ran howling into the street to watch the wagon haul him away, cursing the British, the war, and Colonel Prescott, who had let his men sit atop the battlements without enough powder while the Redcoats swarmed the hillside.
Gretchen had come to Trenton with only a trunk of clothes, her memories of Boston, and a burning hatred for all things British.
That hatred had been stoked by years under the boot: she had known the wigmaker's boy whose demand for his master's payment sparked the incident on King Street in 1770, had been made to serve the family's best bread and beef to the British officer quartered at her mother's house when she was twelve, had watched British soldiers swagger about the streets of Charlestown and Boston like lords at a garden party, expecting people to bow and scrape to them.
And now there was one in the house she shared with Anna and Sarah.
Not British, exactly, and "just a boy," according to Anna. But still a soldier, sent to put down the revolution. And, as a mercenary for the King, perhaps even worse than a simple conscript with no say in where he was sent or what deeds he was expected to perform.
Yes, she had agreed to this arrangement; Anna insisted that these Hessians were good men pulled into the conflict by their Prince's avarice and the King's lust for power. Anna could be very convincing.
"Once they see how we live," Anna had said, "they'll come over to our side. A Hessian soldier is exactly the sort of man we want around the farm." And, with a saucy wink, she had said, "A Hessian soldier would make a fine father for a brood of good American children."
Well enough for a German woman to think that, Gretchen thought bitterly. Perhaps she should find her way to the next ship back to Pomerania, where she can find all the fine German fathers she could want.
And Sarah! Gretchen had expected better of Sarah, who at least wasn't German, but she supposed that living under Anna's roof for six years had turned her head in troublesome ways.
Trenton hadn't suffered under the British heel the way Charlestown and Boston had, and they hadn't seen firsthand how tyranny turned men's hearts to stone.
There were Hessian pickets stationed all along the river, though they seemed focused more on the opposite shore than on the New Jersey side.
Gretchen took the reins in her hands as she approached the stone wall that marked the old ferry road, guiding Yara down the gravel slope and into the stand of trees on the riverbank.
The full moon made the ice on the river sparkle like jewels, and Gretchen could see the ridge of the old dam just below the water.
She tied Yara in a sheltered spot, gave the horse's nose a gentle kiss, and made her way to the river.