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by Errol Lincoln Uys

   BOSTON - BOOK TWO

The House at the Seven Steps

I

1744-1748

DERASTUS TRANE, “Old Disaster,” commands the watch-house on Boston Common. From ten o’clock until daybreak, Derastus and his men walk the rounds with billhook and lantern. “One o’clock, clear, and all’s well!” The cry is as much to reassure citizens as to confirm the constables aren’t sleeping on their watch.

Old Disaster’s patrol reaches into Mount Whoredom on the western slopes of Beacon Hill, a paradise for drunkards, harlots, spendthrifts and outcasts. So many bawdyhouses, says a young English cartographer, no town of comparable size can turn out more prostitutes than Boston.

“Nigger Hill” (historical name) lies northeast of Mount whoredom, an insalubrious warren where free blacks and poor whites make their homes. CAPABLE JOHNSON, a dancing-master by profession, is “governor” of the Hill elected by free blacks, his office a great amusement to the royal appointee in Province House but no laughing matter in Mr. Johnson’s dominion.

Sixty-two year old Derastus is the son of Rufus Trane. Derastus and his wife, Rose, have five children, their first-born CALEB TRANE already in his fortieth year.

When Caleb was thirteen, he was apprenticed to goldsmith John Coney alongside Appolos Revoire. Unlike the elder Paul Revere, Caleb showed little flair for designing cups and porringers or making baubles. He left Coney’s shop to work for Archimedes Knefler, a gunsmith who moved to Boston from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Caleb quickly proved himself more adept at fashioning flintlocks than jewelry, his craft in demand by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.

Major ASHLEY STEELE is a member of this illustrious regiment, a veteran of the capture of Port Royal in 1710, still impressive on the training field and well able to hold his own under the Ancient and Honorable’s barrage of loyal and patriotic toasts.

In 1744, Major Ashley’s eye is again on the north and a nest of “French thieves and Romish popery” at Fort Louisbourg. This bulwark on Cape Breton Island took twenty years to build, so costly to Louis XV that he fully expects to look out of his window at Versailles and see the ramparts rising on the western horizon.

Major Ashley’s son, EMORY STEELE, commands the privateer, Swan, a sixty-ton schooner carrying a crew of sixty and mounting twelve carriage guns and six falconets. Emory is twenty-seven, a merchant-adventurer as sharp on the counting-house floor as spotting an enemy on the high seas.

The two Steeles, father and son, join other merchants meeting with Governor William Shirley at Province House to plan an expedition against Fort Louisburg.

In winter 1744 fifteen armed ships and a hundred transports are readied, the land force of three thousand made up of the hard-bitten sweepings from Boston’s streets and a rag-tag militia recruited in New England towns.

LEMUEL STEELE, the son of Reverend Eden, is a minister like his father. Lemuel’s devils are not witches nor Indians but evangelists like George Whitefield whose Great Awakening “disturbs the peace of our Jerusalem and threatens to turn our churches into Dens of Disorder.”

Lemuel’s younger brother, DEEMS STEELE, was born in 1719 a year before his father died, his mother Ann the preacher’s third wife. Deems is a habitué of the rat pits and shebeens of Mount Whoredom. Old Disaster frequently lights the way home for the rake prodding him along with his billhook as he staggers back to the North End.

Deems has a lover, “NIXIE” FLY, an eighteen-year-old mulatto, who claims to be a child of William Fly, a ship’s boatswain who led a mutiny, drowned his captain and mate and became a pirate. Fly’s month-long rampage from the Carolinas to New England ended with the capture and execution at Boston, his body hung in irons on Nix’s Mate, an island in Boston harbor.

Nixie Fly becomes pregnant with the child of Deems. A date for a bastardy hearing is set in the Boston courts, a risky business for Nixie: putative fathers are commonly ordered to pay support but their partners are fined and whipped in public. Before Nixie’s case can be heard, Deems decamps and joins the Boston men who go to Fort Louisbourg.

• In April 1745, when the New Englanders land three miles from the fortress, Caleb Trane leads a scouting party that finds the Royal Battery at the harbor entrance abandoned. Caleb’s men clear the spikes from a dozen guns and turn them on the French.

• Whaleboats ferry Deems and a gang of rum-soaked provincials to the rocks below an island battery. They’re planting their scaling ladders, when one bright spark gives a huzzah for a successful landing. The French answer with a hail of musket shot. Deems and his men struggle for two hours to win a foothold on the enemy’s works, shot down left and right, until the survivors are forced to quit the island.

• Emory Steele disputes naval commander Peter Warren’s proposal to blast his way into the harbor with his battle line. Instead, Emory and Swan’s crew join Richard Gridley, a young lieutenant of the Ancient and Honorable Company, with a plan to manhandle the English guns up a steep bluff opposite the Island Battery. On June 8 at a range of half a mile, they open a devastating barrage; the battery is blown up one week later. After a siege of forty-six days, Louisbourg’s governor surrenders the Gibraltar of America to the New Englanders.

• Sergeant PHINEAS LYNCH, grandson of Malachy and Keeley, is among the Boston toughs who garrison the fortress. One night, Phineas storms a tavern to break up a brawl over an Irish servant girl left behind by her French employer. The maid he rescues is PHOEBE O’CONNOR wooed all that winter and in spring, too, by the gruff sergeant who wins her heart and takes her home to Boston as his wife. – Deems is one of the tavern brawlers, his vicious lifestyle leading to a gambling quarrel in which he’s challenged to a duel. On an icy February morning below the walls of Louisbourg, Deems Steele is felled with a shot through the heart.

****

Major Ashley and Emory are at the forefront of Boston merchants who make their town the most prosperous in North America. Steele’s Wharf is one of forty wharves, the longest of which reaches two thousand feet into the bay. The city’s trade is four times that of New York.

Ashley lives in the North End. Emory has a handsome three-story brick house on an acre of pastureland at Fort Hill, opposite the malt-house of Captain Samuel Adams.

The Steeles owe part of their success to the African slave trade. Every Boston household of consequence has at least one slave though most “choice parcels of Negro boys and girls” go directly to the southern plantations. Such a lively commerce that one Virginian laments, “the Saints of New England import so many Negroes hither I fear our colony will some time be confirmed by the name of New Guinea.”

Boston itself falls prey to bands of man-catchers when Royal Navy gangs scour the taverns and streets. At Faneuil Hall, Emory joins Captain Samuel Adams and other citizens protesting the impressment warrants. Before dawn on November 16, 1747, the boats of a British man-of-war anchored at Nantasket row across the bay to Boston. The gangers swoop down on the town, grab seamen and shanghai landsmen and apprentices. Ten crewmen from the Swan are taken.

By mid-morning, a mob gathers below the Town House in King Street led by Caleb Trane and Capable Johnson, nabob of the Hill. The crowd lets fly with stones and brickbats forcing Governor Shirley to flee to Castle William where he summons the militia. Sergeant Phineas Lynch and his men refuse to answer Shirley’s call and march instead to The Beaver mustering with “foreign seamen, servants, Negroes and other persons of mean and vile condition.” Rear-Admiral Charles Knowles is forced to release the impressed men and boys who are jubilantly welcomed back to Boston.

The following May, Emory sails Swan across the Atlantic to play havoc with the Spaniards. At dusk one June day, Swan spots a Spanish frigate cruising off the Azores.

Emory orders every man on deck and makes his crew rig sham figures with their spare clothing. Lanterns illuminate these extra hands. The ship’s twelve guns are supplemented by six pieces of wood. Swan closes on her quarry threatening a broadside if they fail to heave to. The Spaniards beg a truce until morning. Emory responds with a warning shot across their bow forcing them to strike their colors.

One hundred prisoners are ferried over to the privateer, “ready to hang themselves at the sight of six wooden guns and scarce enough sailors to hoist topsails.”

On July 4, 1748, Swan makes a graceful landing at Steele’s Wharf. Major Ashley and Emory host a victory banquet at the Bunch of Grapes. A pint of Madeira for each guest, salmon, veal, beef, mutton, fowl and ham, everything paid for with the gold of the dons.

At midnight, Old Disaster stands ready to guide Major Ashley home, respectfully offering his arm to the “Ancient and Honorable.”

II

1753-1776

Nixie Fly didn’t get her day in court. She presented herself big with child on the threshold of Reverend Lemuel Steele, who did not doubt that Deems was responsible. Lemuel gave Nixie £50 on condition she never reveal the father’s identity.

She uses the money to set herself up in business opening a shop on the Hill with the support of Capable Johnson. The “Governor” has long had his eye on the voluptuous mulatto and finally entices her into his seraglio, not as a mistress but as his wife. Married in the summer of 1753, the dance master’s wedding celebration is a week-long bacchanalia that keeps Derastus Trane and his Watch on their toes.

Besides Richard, bastard of Deems, forever known as “Dick Fly,” Nixie and Capable Johnson have three children of their own: Azor, Isanna, and Junius.

Nixie prospers with the “Shop at the Seven Steps,” which local wags declare to be paved with gold. Smuggler’s gold, for most doing business with the pirate’s daughter make their living outwitting the King’s customs officers.

The wealthiest man in New England, John Hancock, considers Madame Johnson a genius of the people helping merchant princes rob the royals and provide seed money for the tree of liberty.

****

MILO LYNCH, son of Phineas and Phoebe O’Connor, was twelve when he began hauling contraband goods from landing places on the South Shore to Boston.

In 1768, ten years later, he has yet to be nabbed by the revenuers. He works by day at John Gray’s ropewalk in the South End. He lives in the Manufactory House on Hamilton Place, once a hive of spinning and weaving, now a ramshackle building occupied by “outcasts of the workhouse and scum of the town.”

Sergeant Phineas and his wife live close by, but Milo prefers to stay with a benighted bunch, who greet him as a regular squire. Smuggling is an honorable profession in rum-soaked Boston, the town’s distilleries drawing on men like Milo for three-quarters of the molasses used to make a million and a half gallons of liquor every year.

Twenty-four-year-old DICK FLY is Milo Lynch’s confederate in the smuggling business.

Not so long ago, they were enemies out to beat each other black and blue: Dick Fly and his gang roaring out of the North End to meet Milo and the South-Enders. These “Pope’s Day” riots turned the town into a battleground, as they fought to capture and burn each other’s “Pope,” a remembrance of Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot.

Recently the cudgel boys made a truce turning the energy of their mobs to raising hell against Tyrants and Tories.

On a March day in 1768, Milo and Dick rendezvous at Nixie’s shop with three others, including Daniel Malcom, a well-built, handsome Irishman in his forties. Malcom is a ship’s master and trader and an implacable foe of the Collector of Customs and his “waiters.”

They’re ready at dusk, when John Hancock’s Liberty berths at Hancock’s Wharf.

The tidewaiters usually work in pairs but Thomas Kirk boards alone. His partner had gone home drunk from the ancient Beaver, its one-hundred-and-sixty-year-old timbers lean precariously toward malodorous Mill Creek.

When Kirk refuses a bribe, Malcom and his party shove him into Liberty’s salon and nail the door shut. Over the next three hours, Liberty’s cargo of Constantia and Madeira is off-loaded and taken to the Shop at the Seven Steps, all but twenty-five pipes that will dutifully be declared the following day.

Hancock’s raiders have a scant week to celebrate their success before the fifty-gun man-of-war Romney anchors off Hancock’s Wharf and trains its guns on Liberty. Tidewaiter Kirk released on a vow of silence denounces the raid and gives chief collector Harrison the proof he needs to seize Hancock’s ship.

Dick Fly posted at the Exchange on King Street gets word of the pending action and raises the alarm.

When Romney’s boats approach Hancock Wharf, Captain Malcom, Milo and Dick and thirty sturdy fellows greet them with a barrage of stones and Hillsborough paint. Romney’s crew fails to land but still cut out Liberty and haul the ship over to the frigate.

Malcom’s “banditti” rough up Collector Harrison and his son, Richard Acklom, an exquisite dandy who is inordinately proud of his flowing locks. Milo comes close to scalping the fop when he snips off Acklom’s perfumed braids with a pair of rusty sheep shears.

The mob beaches the Merry Maid, a dainty yacht hand-crafted by the Harrisons for sailing in the harbor: they drag the boat up Winter Street and make a pretty bonfire on Boston Common.

****

Four months later, Milo and Dick watch sullenly as the first “lobsterbacks” land on Long Wharf and march up King’s Street with fixed bayonets.

The Fourteenth and Twenty-Ninth Regiments are the vanguard of four thousand soldiers sent to police Boston. The Twenty-Ninth, an ill-disciplined bunch of Scots and Irish, camp on the Common while their officers look for winter quarters. They target the Manufactory as a barracks and send Sheriff Greenleaf to evict the tenants.

Milo and Elijah Brown, a Louisbourg veteran, refuse to admit Greenleaf. The sheriff climbs into the factory’s cellar and finds himself under arrest.

Men of the Twenty-Ninth bivouacked across Long Acre (Tremont) rescue Greenleaf but fail to penetrate the fortress.

The Manufactory’s occupants hold out for seventeen days. The soldiers abandon the siege declaring the tenement too squalid for decent men to occupy. Milo heads a victory parade with old Elijah Brown carried on the shoulders of the crowd that tramps down Marlborough and Newbury Street to celebrate below an old elm ennobled as the Tree of Liberty.

****

EDMUND STEELE, the brother of Deems and last-born son of Reverend Eden, is a bookseller and printer with a shop on Cornhill. Edmund is a pillar of society and devout member of “Old Brick,” the First Church of Boston. He has crossed the Atlantic three times to “dear England,” the highlight of these visits a romp in the gardens of Hampton Court palace with King George and his courtiers.

Edmund is fifty-one and the father of three children with his first wife, Alice, who died in 1764. The next year, he married a twenty-two-year-old beauty, SARAH MILES, with chestnut hair and light blue eyes.

Sarah’s expression is gentle and charming but she blushes easily and then becomes truly ravishing. It’s a look that captivates Major Everett Granger on the day he lands at Boston and sees Sarah standing in her garden. The young artillery officer breaks ranks to offer a poesy to the “loveliest flower of New England.”

Edmund is no stranger to Mount Whoredom where he ventures with more discretion than Deems. One aspect of Edmund’s professional life is also strictly guarded: his role as purveyor of pornography to an intimate circle of Boston bibliophiles. He supplies his customers with volumes like Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, The Fruit-Shop and other libertine works smuggled into the City on the Hill for the sons of old Puritans.

Captain Emory Steele, who is the same age as Edmund, now heads the trading house started by Nicholas Steele one hundred and thirty years ago.

Emory is struggling to shore up the slipping fortune of Steele & Sons crippled by boycotts and taxes. Steele’s Wharf is fast disappearing into the sea, its rotting timbers more a hazard than haven for shipping.

At their home on Purchase Street in Fort Hill, Emory and his wife, Prudence, maintain an air of gentility amid fading trophies of Emory’s privateering voyages. Their oldest son, ROBERT STEELE, follows his father into the trading house that has three remaining ships, one of them the old Swan. Fifteen-year-old WILLIAM STEELE is a graduate of Harvard studying medicine with Dr. Joseph Warren. There are four slaves in the Steele house, three men and a young woman, the men rented out as day laborers.

On a November day in 1768, Emory finds it pure agony to stand motionless as the artist John Copley paints his portrait. Copley’s background depicts Swan about to depart from Steele’s Wharf on a privateering voyage.

When Emory’s purgatory finally ends, he leaves Copley’s house on Beacon Street and makes his way to Dassett Alley behind the Town House. He climbs to the first-floor printing works of Edes and Gill, publishers of the Boston Gazette, where members of the Long Room Club meet.

The radicals coming to debate “diabolical Mischiefs of London and its representatives,” include Samuel Adams, the son of Emory’s Purchase Street neighbor, John Adams, John Hancock, James Otis, and the two doctors, Benjamin Church and Joseph Warren.

A few artisans like the gunsmith, JETHRO TRANE, and Paul Revere also belong to this caucus in the middle part of town, though Trane and Revere will soon be more active in the North Caucus at the Green Dragon Tavern.

While their elders shape the course of revolution, a rising generation of liberty boys swarms the streets of Boston, a plague of pesky mosquitoes to the Redcoats.

LOYAL TRANE is a ten-year-old terrier snapping at the heels of the “Bloody-backs!” Loyal is a pupil at “North Writing” in Bennett Street, where John Tileston holds sway over several generations of North End ruffians.

“Master Johnny” has a deformed hand drawn together like a beak that he uses to rap the numb-skulled with blows that do credit to the bill of an albatross. Loyal frequently leaves school with his large head ringing and eyes smarting, Master Johnny seen as a tyrant worse than any purple-faced Redcoat.

The Tranes live on Fleet Street where Caleb and Loyal’s father, Jethro, work as gunsmiths. Destined for the same craft, Loyal does chores around the shop and delivers customers’ weapons, including pieces belonging to members of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company.

None so honorable as Quartermaster Archibald Tiptree, whose daughter BESS TIPTREE is a tall, flaxen-haired thirteen-year-old who turns eyes when she promenades on Long Acre Mall. Loyal has a rival for the girl’s attention in fifteen-year-old William Steele, a cadet officer in the Ancient and Honorable, who looks his sharpest on Training Day begging just one glance from Bess.

****

The fictional protagonists of Boston’s rebellion against the British rise from these ranks of Steeles and Tranes, Lynches and Johnsons.  A sampling of roles seen for them:

• At Christmas 1768, Edmund and Sarah attend a ball at Province House invited by Governor Francis Bernard, a patron of Edmund’s bookshop, who prides himself on memorizing all the plays of Shakespeare. For a merry wife of Boston, no hour holds more joy than when Sarah dances with Major Everett Granger, her cheeks aflame in that sea of scarlet. Sarah and Everett are lovers, their liaisons taking place while Edmund is engrossed with the adventures of Fanny Hill and other filles de joye.

• In August 1769, a banquet is held at “Liberty Hall,” the open ground surrounding Liberty Tree: Milo and Dick join the crowd commemorating a riot four years earlier, when an effigy of Stamp-master Oliver was hung, along with a jackboot representing colonial secretary, Earl of Bute. On this August day, the mob roams Boston taunting soldiers and picketing houses of Tory supporters, few more despised than John Mein, publisher of the Chronicle.  Samuel Adams intervenes personally to stop the patriots from burning Mein’s printing works. Two months later, Milo and Dick lead a gang of waterfront bullies who stalk Mein on King Street. Mein and a friend flee to the main guard near the Town House. The infuriated mob pounces on George Gailer, a seaman from the Liberty used as a revenue cutter after its confiscation. Gailer is stripped naked and daubed with tar and feathers.

• Sarah Steele goes secretly to see Nixie at the Shop at the Seven Steps. Pregnant with her lover’s child, Sarah asks Nixie help in getting an abortion. Madame Johnson sends her to Natick, where a half-breed midwife called Cora Petit, a descendant of Jacques Petit, attends her. Cora is one of only thirty-seven surviving Indians at the former Praying Town.

• In February 1770, a crowd of howlers and brawlers gathers outside the North End shop of Theophilus Lillie, where they erecting a sign declaring Lillie to be an Importer of English goods. Lillie’s neighbor, Ebenezer Richardson, a customs official is “a detestable person, an adulterer, an incestuous fornicator and perjurer,” according to Samuel Adams. Richardson attempts to tear down the sign outside Lillie’s shop. Loyal Trane is a leader of the attack on Richardson pelting the “damn son of a bitch” with stones and eggs and driving him back to his house. Flanking Loyal are Azor Johnson and his sister, Isanna, a cheeky ten-year-old doted on by Nixie. Richardson loads a musket with pea-sized swanshot and threatens the rowdy children from an upper window. The boys and girls derisively challenge him to fire. Richardson pulls the trigger. Loyal is peppered in the shoulder. Another eleven-year-old Christopher Seider takes a blast of slugs in his abdomen. Attended by Joseph Warren and his assistant, William Steele, Seider dies at nine that night. The Long Room Club orchestrates a spectacular funeral with four hundred schoolboys in pairs preceding Seider’s bier through the snowy streets. Six youths carry the coffin followed by two thousand mourners. Thirty chariots and chaises close the procession which covers five-eighths of a mile from Liberty Tree to the Town House.

• Milo is at Gray’s ropewalk when a soldier of the Twenty-Ninth comes looking for part-time work. “Go clean my shithouse,” Milo offers. The soldier takes a swing at him and is knocked to the ground. He returns with forty men who battle the rope-makers around the tar kettle getting the worst of it and being forced to flee back to barracks. The following day, Milo and two others armed with “batts” tangle with a trio of soldiers leaving one grenadier with a fractured skull. By Sunday, March 4, as church bells ring out over Boston, a state of undeclared war exists between the patriots and the Redcoats.

• The events of March 5, 1770 unfold with Milo and Dick Fly and their cudgel boys roaming the streets and spoiling for a fight. At The Beaver, they join others including Crispus Attucks, who are fueling themselves with rum and flip when the bells of Old Brick ring out. The alarm is confirmed by cries of “Fire!” Simultaneously, a second cry is raised about Redcoats preparing to butcher innocent citizens in King Street. Milo, Dick and Attucks leave The Beaver with twenty men, pausing briefly in Dock Square to listen to a tall man in a white wig and red cloak. – It’s Emory Steele sent by the Long Room Club to prevent mischief that could precipitate a bloodbath. – They ignore Emory’s call for calm and pass on to King Street where a mob is harassing the main guard. The first shots ring out and two bullets plough into Attucks’s chest. Soldiers load and fire at will. Ten more lie dead or wounded in the snow. Crispus Attucks is carried to Capable Johnson’s home on the Hill, where the runaway slave lies in state, one of the first heroes of the American Revolution.

• In the “Quiet Years” from 1770 to 1773, Sarah Steele takes a string of lovers after her affair with Everett Granger ends. She rides with a brevet-colonel of Dragoons in the Milton Hunt. She straddles a royal comptroller below the cupola of Province House. “The slut Sarah Steele” sleeps her way into the highest British circles and becomes a confidante of General Gage’s American-born wife, Margaret Kemble. Sarah is one of the most trusted and resourceful spies in the secret service organized by Paul Revere. Nixie uses all her genius as contrabandist to outwit the British traps set for her and sends Sarah’s reports to the revolutionaries.

• In December 1773, Loyal Trane holds a lantern for his father, Jethro, and others in the home of printer Benjamin Edes, where they disguise themselves as Mohawk Indians. The rally in Old South closes with Samuel Adams’s famous declaration: “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” Jethro and his cohorts give a loud war whoop. Young William Steele, his face blackened with soot and streaked with red ochre, his head adorned with turkey feathers, marches shoulder to shoulder with Milo Lynch and his mates from The Manufactory. “To Boston Harbor! A tea-pot tonight!”

• In May 1774, Emory moves Swan to Marblehead in advance of the blockade of Boston harbor. He goes back to sea as a privateer and Swan briefly relives her glory days in the Atlantic. A British man-of-war puts an end to the old ship. Emory is captured and transported to England where he is thrown into the notorious Forton Prison. He makes a daring escape aided by JOSEPH STEELE of the Clerkenwell Steeles, for generations the Boston family’s London agents.

• Madame Johnson is busy despite the throttlehold on Boston’s commerce. Tories and Whigs climb the seven stops to her shop, one party looking for ways to smuggle items into town, the other seeking to move their possessions to safe houses in the countryside. Milo and Dick intrepidly facilitate this traffic by land and sea. In winter 1774, the caucus of the Green Dragon Tavern enlists the pair for a perilous mission to help deserters escape the peninsula and go over to the army of farmers. On April 19, 1775, Milo and Dick are returning after releasing three “caged birds” when they find themselves in the thick of the action at Lexington. They join one of the guerilla bands that make Lord Percy dance all the way back to Boston.

• When Paul Revere and William Dawes set out on their famous rides, a third messenger leaves Joseph Warren’s Hanover Street surgery. William Steele carries a forged pass authorizing him to attend a patient in Braintree; he crosses the Neck and rides beyond Blue Hills to alert towns on the south. By nightfall William returns to Boston in time to meet the first boatloads of British wounded ferried over from Charlestown. When Warren quits Boston, William leaves with him and serves as medic with the Continental army forming at Cambridge. Two months later at the Battle of Bunker Hill, William sees his beloved mentor shot dead.

• In winter 1775, as rebels lay siege to Boston. Dick Fly makes frequent clandestine trips across Back Bay mudflats to bring supplies to Nixie. He is finally caught and incarcerated on a prison ship in the harbor. Dick gets off lightly, for his captors get no inkling that he’s been carrying Sarah Steele’s messages to George Washington. Sarah moves from the bedroom to the boards in Faneuil Hall, where she plays a lady of quality in The Blockade of Boston, a farce from the pen of General John Burgoyne. The Redcoats are seen polluting the City on the Hill with such vulgar follies. They turn Old South into a riding stable and cart off a luxurious pew to make a sty for General Burgoyne’s prized pig, “Sam Adams.” All to the delight of Edmund Steele who strolls on the Mall with Lord Percy and other gentlemen, as a regimental band serenades them with a mocking medley of “Yankee Doodle.”

• That terrible winter an old man and a boy make an incredible journey, five hundred miles from Boston to Ticonderoga to fetch the guns captured from the British by Ethan Allen. The cannon are loaded onto forty-two sleds drawn by eighty yoke of oxen and hauled six weeks through snows and blizzards. At the beginning of March 1776, twelve hundred men fortify a pair of hills overlooking Boston harbor within half a mile of British fortifications on the Neck. British twenty-four pounders light up the night sending shells hurtling toward the hills. By dawn the guns dragged from Ticonderoga are in position on Dorchester Heights. The British unleash a furious cannonade in which old Caleb Trane is killed. The officer in command passes the lintstock to the veteran’s grandson. “Fire, Loyal!” he orders. “Fire!” The lad has tears in his eyes as he lights the fuse and lets the cannon roar its challenge to Province House.

On March 17, 1776, Loyal Trane is with the first liberty boys to enter Boston. He watches from Beacon Hill as seventy-eight British warships and transports weigh anchor and head out of the great bay.

BOOK THREE - LONG WHARF

©2015 Errol Lincoln Uys

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