Held to the Fire

The packet came up through the Narrows on the evening tide, and Mr Penn was at the door of the house at the foot of the Broadway before ten, with the case under his coat; and Sir Henry Clinton, who had been sitting up over the returns of the sick, as he sat up over everything, received him in his study in his shirt-sleeves and was ashamed of it, and put his coat on, and was more ashamed of having been seen to mind.

He knew who Penn was. Everybody did. He was the man who had carried the Congress’s petition to London in seventy-five, and been examined about it at the bar of the House of Lords, and stayed in England afterwards, people said, because he could not decide which side of the water he belonged to; a pleasant, easy, well-made man of forty or so, with the kind of face that is liked at dinners, and very tired about the eyes. He was brown from the voyage. He said that they had run into the French and the Spaniards together in the mouth of the Channel, sixty sail of the line, and been chased all one afternoon by two of their frigates, and had got away in the dark, and that he was very glad to be ashore; and then he took a flat leather case out from under his coat, from the left side, where it had evidently been for a long time, and held it out.

“From Lord Shelburne, Sir Henry. With His Majesty’s leave. I have not opened it.”

“No,” said Clinton. “I did not suppose you had.”

He took it. It was warm from Penn’s coat. He stood holding it, and found that he did not want to open it in front of anybody, even this man, who had carried it three thousand miles and would have been entitled to watch; and Penn, who seemed to understand that, said that he would not keep Sir Henry, and that he had a bed at an inn in the Hanover Square, and would wait on him in the morning if he was wanted.

“You will dine with me tomorrow,” Clinton said. “I insist upon it. Is there anything I can do for you, Mr Penn? Anything at all. You have done the King a service.”

Penn hesitated at the door. Then he said, with a sort of embarrassment, that his wife’s mother lived in Philadelphia, and his wife had asked him, if he came within ninety miles of the place, to send and ask whether there was anything left of their house.

“I shall be sending a flag up the river within the week,” said Clinton. “Write your letter, and I will see that it goes with the flag, and that it is sent on.” He did not know why he had said within the week. He had not yet broken the seal. But he knew, somehow, standing there with the warm case in his hand, that he would be sending a flag, and that it would be within the week; and after Penn had gone he stood for a moment in the middle of the room, listening to the house, before he sat down at the table under the lamp and broke Lord Shelburne’s seal.

---

He read it three times, and then a fourth, as he read everything.

It was not long. Lord Shelburne wrote a quick, plain, rather beautiful hand, very unlike the clerks’ hands in which the department had sent him his instructions under Lord Dartmouth, and very unlike his own. His Majesty’s servants were determined to put an end to the war in America. Sir Henry was empowered and directed to propose to General Washington a cessation of arms, by land and sea, and to write to him first, under a flag of truce, to that end; and to name a place where the two of them, or officers on their behalf, might meet to agree it. Boston was suggested, since His Majesty’s troops and those of the Congress had been present there together for most of a year without hostilities; but Sir Henry was to use his own judgement. He was empowered, further, to agree with General Washington such heads as might serve as the basis of a treaty, to be laid before commissioners whom His Majesty would appoint to treat with the Congress upon every point in dispute between the two countries, not excepting a legislature in America under the Crown. In the meantime he was to undertake no offensive operation.

And at the end, in a separate paragraph, as if it had been added after the rest was written: His Majesty, having been made acquainted with Sir Henry’s repeated desire to be relieved of the command, was graciously pleased to permit him to resign it, as soon as the cessation had been agreed, if he should still desire to do so.

He sat for some time with that.

He had asked three times before he was given the command, and twice since, in long letters he had written and rewritten at this table, setting out with great care all the reasons why another man would do better: that he had not the troops he had been promised, nor the ships, nor the confidence of the ministers, nor of his own officers, which he knew; that he was not suited to it. The answer had always come back, very civilly, that His Majesty could not spare him. And now it had come back the other way, in Lord Shelburne’s quick hand, at the bottom of a letter that ended the war; and he found, reading it, that he did not know whether he still desired it or not, which was very like him, and which he would have to think about.

Not now. He took a sheet of paper and wrote a memorandum of the letter, in his own hand, point by point, as he had written a memorandum of every order he had ever received, because the only papers a man could rely on afterwards were the ones he had written himself. He dated it. He read it over, and it was not well written, and it was exact.

Then he got up, and took the key off his watch chain, and unlocked the drawer.

---

It was the bottom drawer on the right of his campaign desk, a big brass-bound thing that had come out with him to Boston in seventy-five and gone everywhere with him since. It held the papers he never burned.

They were all there, in their order, tied in bundles with tape, endorsed on the outside in his own hand: the memoranda of four years, of every council of war he had sat in and every conversation with Sir William that he had thought he might need afterwards to prove; his notes on Long Island, on the Highlands, on Philadelphia; his count of the people who had followed the artillery wagons out of Philadelphia and kept up, with the date and nothing else. There were letters from his children, a great many of them, in round careful hands. There were Harriet’s letters, which he did not read and did not move.

And there was a packet at the back, thinner than the rest, in a paper cover, endorsed in André’s hand and not in his: Monk.

He took it out and untied it and spread it on the table under the lamp.

He knew what was in it. He had read every sheet of it as it came, in the summer, with André at his elbow, and made a memorandum of each, which was in the packet too. The first letter, which had come in June in a Philadelphia china merchant’s luggage, written out as an invoice for glass, with the real letter written between the lines in an ink that could not be seen until the paper was held to the fire; and André’s fair copy of it, deciphered, out of Blackstone, page and line and word. The general officer was disposed to serve His Majesty. The general officer could be of more use to His Majesty than any man in America. The general officer wished to know what His Majesty’s commander would think such service worth. Then André’s draft of the answer, in André’s pretty hand, with Clinton’s own corrections on it, which had made it, André said afterwards, rather more prudent and rather less polite: that the general officer might join the army, and accept a command, and be surprised, and be cut off, as might happen to anybody in the course of a campaign, without being censured or suspected; and that two guineas a head would be paid for every soldier so surrendered, up to the number of five or six thousand.

He looked at that for some time. He had let the figures stand. He had thought, at the time, that it was a fair price.

Then the second letter, in July, with its numbers and its intelligence, and the third, which was about money and nothing else: the general officer could not promise success, he would deserve it; he wished to be told what he might expect; and with it, folded small, in the general officer’s own hand, quite openly, as though it did not matter who saw it, a list of things his wife wished to have sent out from New York in the millinery way, gauze and ribbons and needles and a particular kind of cap wire. Clinton had refused to name a sum in advance. He had told André to say again that services would be rewarded in proportion to their consequence, which was the truth and meant nothing; and since then there had been one more letter, short and angry, and then nothing, and André had been writing to the lady about caps.

He sat with it all in front of him under the lamp, in the quiet house, with the window open on the warm night and the sound of the harbour coming in, the water against the Battery and a bell on a ship somewhere striking the half hour; and he thought about what it was.

---

It was the only plan he had ever had that might have won the war.

He knew that. He had known it since the first letter, though he had not let himself say it, even to André: that he could not beat Washington in the field, not now, not after Monmouth, where he had seen the line on the ridge standing; and that he could not take West Point or the Highlands with the troops he had, and could not hold them if he took them; and that the one thing in America that might yet put the Congress’s army into his hands was a general officer of that army who wished to know what it would be worth. It had been sitting in his drawer all summer, like a loaded pistol in a gentleman’s desk, and he had been telling himself all summer that a man did not have to fire a pistol because it was there.

He made himself think it through plainly, as he would have thought through a march. There would be a cessation. He would write to Washington, and Washington would answer, and the two of them would meet at Boston or somewhere like it, and sign something; and then commissioners would come, and sit down with the Congress, and the war would turn, very slowly, into an argument about a Parliament. Neither army would have been beaten. Both would still be standing, at the end of it, in the same country, with their officers; and two armies that had not beaten each other could not very well begin their peace by hanging each other’s friends. There would have to be a pardon, for everybody, for everything, or there would be no peace at all.

But a pardon was for what men had done. It was not for what was found in their drawers.

If this were found, in a year, or ten, by anybody, in this house or in his papers in England after he was dead, it would be found by men who would print it. The Congress would read that the King’s commander in America had been buying one of its generals, at two guineas a head of the soldiers, in the same summer that the King’s ministers were sending to ask for a cessation of arms; and it would believe, quite reasonably, that the cessation had been a trick, and every word that came from London after it; and the commissioners would sit at their table with this lying on it between them, and nothing that was said across it would be believed again. And the general officer, who had done nothing yet, who had only offered, and been told that his offer would be rewarded in proportion to its consequence, would hang, or be shot, or be torn to pieces in the street, and his wife would be ruined with him, whether she had known or not; and André, whose hand was on every sheet, would be the man who had done it, for the rest of his life.

And Clinton’s own hand was on it too. He looked at his corrections on André’s draft. Be surprised, be cut off. He had read that sentence with his pen in his hand, and corrected its grammar, and let it go.

He sat until the candle in the lamp began to gutter. Then he tied the packet up again, and put it back in the drawer, and locked it, and went to bed, and did not sleep.

---

He sent for André in the morning.

André came in at eight, fresh and handsome in his scarlet, with his hair dressed and a sheaf of returns under his arm, smelling faintly of somebody’s orange-flower water; twenty-nine, and very able, and very much liked, and the man Clinton meant to make adjutant general, now that Lord Rawdon had thrown up the office a week ago in a letter that Clinton had read three times and could not answer. Clinton was very fond of him. He was aware that everybody knew it, and he did not care.

He told André what had come in the night. He watched André’s face while he told him, and saw it change: saw him understand, and be glad, and then see the drawer behind the glad thing, and stop being glad.

“I want every paper you have touching Monk,” Clinton said. “Every one. Your drafts, your copies, the keys, Mr Odell’s notes and Mr Stansbury’s, anything in any hand. I want them here by noon.”

André stood quite still.

“Sir,” he said. “It is the best card we hold.”

“It was.”

“If the cessation should fail. If the Congress should refuse, or the commissioners quarrel, as commissioners do, or the ministry fall again, which God knows it may. Sir Henry, he is a major general of their army, and he is willing, and he has only to be given a command. We should be throwing away the one thing General Washington cannot see coming.”

“We are not playing any longer, André.” Clinton heard his own voice, which was stiff, as it always was when he meant something; he could never make it do otherwise. “We have been told to stop. If the cessation fails, then it fails, and we shall fight on with what we have, as we have fought on for four years. But I will not sit across a table from General Washington with that in my drawer. And I will not leave it there after I am dead, for somebody to find.”

André looked at him for a long moment. Then he bowed, rather more formally than he usually bowed to Clinton, and went out; and came back before noon, as he had been told, with a portfolio under his arm, and put it on the table without a word, and stood by the window while Clinton went through it.

It was all there. André was very exact, for a man who wrote verses. When Clinton had looked through it all, he asked André to write a line, by the safest hand he knew, to Mr Odell, for Mr Stansbury, for the gentleman in Philadelphia: that the business was at an end, and that no more letters were to be written, on either side, about anything, ever; and that if anything was ever said, by anybody, nothing had ever been written.

“No reasons, sir?”

“No reasons. He will know the reasons in a week. Everybody will.” Clinton looked at the portfolio. “And André. You will not keep a copy of that letter.”

André smiled then, a little, for the first time that morning. “No, sir,” he said. “I had understood that.”

---

He had the fire lit that night, in the study.

It was a warm night, and the window was open, and Mrs Baddeley, who kept his house, brought the coals up herself, because the servants had gone to bed, and looked at the grate, and at the open window, and at him.

“A fire, Sir Henry? In September?”

“I am cold,” he said. She looked at him a moment longer. Then she laid the fire, and lit it, and went away without saying anything else, which was the thing about her he had always valued most.

He waited until it was burning well. Then he took the packet out of the drawer, and André’s portfolio from the table, and drew his chair up to the hearth, and began.

He did it a sheet at a time. He did not know why; it would have been quicker to put them all in at once, and he did not. He took each sheet and held it out over the coals, and watched it catch at the corner and the flame go up the edge of it; and the strange thing, the thing he had not thought of, was the first letter, the one that had come in the box of invoices. He held it over the fire, and as the heat reached it the hidden writing came up between the lines of the invoice, brown, the way it had been meant to: rows of numbers, page and line and word, rising out of the blank paper in the general officer’s hand, quite clear, for a moment, as clear as on the night André had first held it to a candle in this room; and then the flame came across them, and they went black with the rest, and curled, and were gone.

It had been made to be held to the fire. He had not thought of that.

He burned André’s copies, and André’s drafts, with his own corrections on them. He burned the keys. He burned the list of millinery. Then he came to his own memoranda, the ones he had written of each letter as it came, in his own hand, dated and exact; and he sat with them in his lap for a long time, while the fire burned down a little and the harbour bell struck again.

He had never burned a paper in his life. His friends had given up trying to cure him of it. He had kept every memorandum of every council, every order, every slight, every doubt, for twenty years, because the only papers a man could rely on afterwards were the ones he had written himself, and because he had always known, as shy men know, that one day he would need to prove what he had done. He would need to prove it about this as well, perhaps. They would blame him for this too, if anybody ever knew there had been a this; and the only proof he had was in his lap.

The memoranda went into the fire. It was not so very hard, once it was done. He broke the black leaves with the poker until no words could be read. Then he locked the drawer, from habit, and went to bed.

---

He wrote to Washington the next day.

He wrote it himself, in his own hand, at the big table, and it took him most of the morning, because he never wrote well and knew it, and because every sentence of this one would be read, he supposed, by a great many people for a long time. He tore up four beginnings. The fifth he let stand.

He wrote that he had the honour to acquaint His Excellency that he had received His Majesty’s commands to propose a cessation of arms, and that he did so by this flag. He wrote that he would be glad to meet His Excellency, or such officers as His Excellency should appoint, at a time and place convenient to both, to agree upon it; and that since the troops under His Excellency’s command and His Majesty’s troops had been present together at Boston for the greater part of a year without hostilities, he would submit that Boston was the place. He wrote that His Majesty would appoint commissioners to treat with the Congress upon every point in dispute, not excepting a legislature in America under the Crown. He wrote that in the meantime he had ordered that no offensive operation be undertaken by any part of the forces under his command. And he had the honour to be, with great respect, His Excellency’s most obedient and most humble servant.

He addressed the cover himself, too. To His Excellency General Washington. He sat looking at that for a moment before he sealed it. Three years ago Lord Howe had sent a letter up the river to George Washington, Esquire, because the King did not recognise any general of the Congress’s making, and it had come back to him unopened; and they had tried it again, and it had come back again; and there had been a whole correspondence, among sensible men, about whether it might be addressed with et cetera. He thought that it had been the first thing in the war he had found ridiculous, and that it was a long time ago.

Then he took a copy of it for his letter-book, because this was a paper he meant to keep.

---

André carried it.

There was no question of anybody else. It was the most important letter Clinton had ever written, and André was the man in the army he trusted most, and the man in the army the Americans would most like, and both of those things were true and Clinton knew which of them weighed more with him and did not inquire. He went up the North River on the Thursday in a barge with a white flag in the bows and a drummer and six oarsmen, past the King’s posts at Stony Point and Verplanck’s and on up into the Highlands, where the river narrowed between the mountains and the rebel works stood on the heights above it, to General Washington’s headquarters at West Point; and he came back on the Monday, very pleased with himself.

General Washington had received him with great civility. He was taller than André had expected, and quieter, and he had read the letter twice, standing, and then sat down and read it again, and said very little; and André had been asked to dine with the General’s family, his aides, and had liked them extremely, particularly one of the aides, a Colonel Hamilton, who was very clever and very young and talked quite as much as André did, so that they had got on famously, and had sat up arguing about Pope.

He brought back a letter. Washington wrote a strong, clear, rather large hand, and he wrote that he had received Sir Henry’s letter by the hand of his aide-de-camp, and that he had the honour to inform Sir Henry that he could enter into no engagement of that kind without the authority of the Congress, to whom he had transmitted Sir Henry’s letter by express, and from whom he would expect an answer in a few days; and that in the meantime he had given orders to the troops under his command corresponding to those Sir Henry had been good enough to give his own.

It was exactly the letter Clinton had expected, and it pleased him a great deal more than he had expected. He read it three times. He made a memorandum of it.

---

The second letter came on the seventh of October, by a flag at Paulus Hook.

The Congress had authorised General Washington to agree a cessation of arms with Sir Henry Clinton, and to agree such heads as might serve for the basis of a treaty. General Washington would be at Boston by the sixteenth. He proposed that they meet in the State House there, in the Council chamber, on Tuesday the nineteenth; and he understood that Sir Henry would wish to come by sea, and had written to the Council of the Massachusetts Bay to make the arrangements.

So it was settled. A frigate would carry him round to Boston; Admiral Arbuthnot, who had been very disagreeable all September about everything, was suddenly very obliging about the frigate, as though he could not get Clinton out of New York fast enough, which was possibly the case. Clinton told André and Kemble and a few others that they would come with him, and watched Kemble’s face, and thought that it would all be in Kemble’s journal by night, and that it did not matter now.

He went back to his study when they had gone, and sat down at the big table, and took out Lord Shelburne’s letter, and read the last paragraph again: the King’s gracious permission to resign the command, as soon as the cessation had been agreed, if he should still desire it.

He found he did not, yet. He found that he wanted to see it through: the cessation, and the commissioners, and the garrisons coming in, and the army going home, ship by ship, in the order he would set down for it; and the other thing, which was not in Lord Shelburne’s letter anywhere, and which he had looked for, and which he had known before he looked that he would not find.

There were more of them now than there had been at the Hook. There were people from the Jerseys and from Westchester and from Long Island and from as far off as Virginia, who had come into the King’s lines at New York over three years, without being asked and without being promised anything, and worked for the army, and lived in Canvas Town among the burned houses, and waited. Nobody had told them anything. Nobody would. The orders said nothing about them, and the heads would say nothing about them, and the commissioners would have other things to talk about; and when the King’s army went home, ship by ship, in the order Clinton set down for it, the people who owned them under the law would be waiting at the gates of the town with their papers. He had known that since Philadelphia. He did not know what to do about it. He knew only that it would come to him in the end, because everything did, and that he would rather be here when it came than in England reading about it in a newspaper three months late.

He took a sheet of paper and wrote a memorandum of it, in his own hand, with the numbers as near as he could get them. He dated it. Then he put it in the bottom drawer on the right, with the other papers he would never burn; where there was a good deal more room than there had been.