Chapter 12
"We'll cross the river first," Patrick said, "below McConkey's ferry, and move through Birmingham, west of the town and the Hessian barracks."
He knelt and traced a crude map in the snow with a gloved finger — the river bending south to east, the road to Pennington, a depression in the ice to represent Trenton.
Gretchen stood behind him, her cloak thrown across her shoulders but still dressed in a soldier's trousers and coat, chilled fingers gripping the warm tin cup.
"When we've taken the first pickets here and here —" he pressed his thumb above the line denoting the Delaware — "the main force will come across to our north and continue around behind Trenton.
" He traced a wide loop above the map. "By then, the Hessians will have fallen back beyond King Street to the east, and across the Assunpink Creek bridge.
When General Gates and his Ticonderoga cannon swing down from the north, they'll have nowhere to run but straight into our ready arms."
Gretchen squinted and scowled, shifting around to view the map from a more familiar angle.
She was used to imagining the river before her, south of Anna's farm, the town of Trenton off to the right, the barn and fields to her back.
Realization dawned slowly in her frost-addled mind, and she let out a gasp.
"The orchard," Gretchen said, falling to her knees beside Patrick. "The orchard is here, just above the bridge —" she pressed her thumb into the snow near the spot Patrick had noted for the bridge — "and Anna's farm is ... here."
Gretchen dragged a finger up from the orchard, making a line that met the path the cannon would take.
She closed her eyes, picturing the guns at the top of Breed's Hill, spitting fire as the Redcoats surged up the slope.
She imagined those same guns throwing their heavy shot at Anna's house, splintering the white clapboard, laying waste to the red barn, setting everything that Gretchen, Sarah, and Anna held dear ablaze.
"Well," Patrick said, standing and wiping his hands against his coat, "then I suppose we'll make the acquaintance of your Hessian soldier soon enough. I hope for his sake that he sees the wisdom of choosing to become a guest of General Washington's army rather than a martyr for the King."
***
The wind was rising from the north as the sun began to set, and the snow muffled the sounds of marching feet and the wheels of the wagons hauling the heavy guns along the road to the river. Clouds had rolled in ahead of the wind, obscuring the bright moon rising to the east.
Gretchen sat astride one of the mules in the train pulling the cannon, cloak pulled up to her ears against the cold.
She couldn't dispel the image of certain doom awaiting Anna's farm that haunted her thoughts: everything in flames, all their hopes scattered, the three of them fleeing despair again as the cruel war raged around them.
"I wish David were here to see this day," Patrick had said as he helped Gretchen onto the mule's back. "We've been on the run too long, Gretchen, harried by the King's hirelings; today we'll strike a blow for liberty. Victory or death!"
Gretchen closed her eyes, chilled fingers gripping the mule's harness.
Victory or death. It would be a hollow victory indeed if the farm were laid waste by Washington's army; a hundred defeated Hessians, even a thousand, weren't worth a single stone of Anna's farm.
When all her hope was lost — her husband dead, her home besieged — Anna had taken her in, set her back on her feet, and given her a space in which to catch her breath.
The little farm in Trenton may be only a feather on the scales of history, but it was her feather, and more precious to her than all the liberty promised by the revolution.
What would David think, Gretchen wondered, chiding herself, if he heard me pining for a few sticks and stones on the edge of the wilderness, when there's a free nation at stake?
When she fled Boston, and then heard that Washington's army had been routed in New York and that the British were launching more assaults against New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Gretchen had felt a black despair.
Had David died in vain, his dream of liberty crushed beneath the tyrant's boot?
A victory at Trenton would revive hope, would rally a tired people under the banner of Congress and freedom, and set the British back on their heels.
But that felt abstract now, mere fancy words and lofty rhetoric, when compared to Anna's farm.
She thought of David's last kiss on her lips as he left for Breed's Hill, his fingers lingering against her cheek; of the distant thunder of guns as the battle raged above the Charles River, and of her keening wails when they brought David home one last time.
Those things — the cruelty of the British, the war's heartless momentum — they were real, too, and not just a list of grievances sent to a King who would never listen.
And yet Anna had invited a Hessian soldier into their home — indeed, had all but invited him into their beds!
When they were musing over Anna's plan late at night, dizzy and bold with warm cider, it hadn't seemed so mad: three widows could certainly share a man while retaining more freedom than they could with a husband each, and gain the protection they sorely needed in these uncertain times.
They knew that in the coming years, after the ravages of war and the hardship and disease that always followed, there would be fewer men available, and those they could find would rather have a blushing bride of twenty than a withered crone past thirty.
They all knew women a few years older who had been left spinsters by the French wars, forced to live under their fathers' roofs, eternal dependents; no woman who had tasted freedom wanted that.
But could a woman — could Gretchen — be happy as one hen of three sharing a rooster, as Anna would have it?
No man could replace David: her heart had no room in it for another after she had once loved so deeply and so heedlessly.
Better a barren widow until the end of her days than to be stricken by the grief and loss that had nearly ended her in Boston.
The grief of losing Anna's farm, though, would be just as cold and bleak as losing David had been.
And the irony of losing it to Washington's army tore at Gretchen's heart.
She could no more still the boots marching around her that were bound for the fight against tyranny than she could still the tyrant boots that had crushed her soul in Boston.
Gretchen clung to the mule's harness, tears freezing on her cheeks, carried like a leaf on the icy river toward a terrible rendezvous with fate.