The Glendower Legacy Read Free Page A

peeled it loose and looked at the words, smudged and soiled but still legible. All but the top corner of the sheet had survived. He read it, his Vision hazy from the constant feeling of dizziness, and felt himself go faint, his legs soften.
    He couldn’t cope with it. He couldn’t show it to anyone. He couldn’t go to General Washington’s headquarters, he couldn’t take it to Captain Whittaker, he dared not show it to anyone—not until he’d thought it through. Surely, it couldn’t be true … but he’d seen it happen and, by God, now he recognized the shape coming toward him with the drawn pistol. He saw it again and again when he closed his eyes, the featureless face in the flare of the pistol shot.
    Befuddled and exhausted, he tied the sheet of paper along with letters from his mother to the back of a framed portrait of her which he kept at the bottom of his small kit bag. He had no place else to hide something. Then he told his bunkmate, John Higgins, to make sure his few personal effects reached his family in Cambridge should he fall victim to the dread dysentery or expire in any other way. Death was everywhere, all around him. He grew depressed as the day wore on, found himself unable to eat. He felt as if a rat were gnawing at his bowels. What was he meant to do with such an unbelievable piece of information?
    That night he couldn’t sleep. Past midnight, his guts in an unholy uproar, he wrapped his torn coat around his shivering body, pushed his way past his sleeping mates sprawled here and there in the cabin, went outside coughing from the ever-present smoke. He wiped soot from his eyes, felt the tallow and sulfur congealing on his flesh the moment he left the cabin. It was dark as he paced numbly through the alleyways of frozen, rutted mud and snow toward the latrine. A hard wind took his breath away as he leaned forward. At first he didn’t see the two men who stepped from the shadows into his path.
    “Soldier,” one of them said, a soldier he’d noticed walking beside him earlier in the day. “Soldier, stand!” the man said softly. The voice was insistent. The second figure joined him, something fluttering in his outstretched hand.
    “What?” William Davis said. “I’ve got to get to the latrine—”
    “Tell us, is this yours, soldier?” The second man held out the torn shred of heavy cloth. The brass button caught the light of a torch across the way. “Take a closer look, soldier …”
    “It’s mine—I tore my coat. …” He was having trouble focusing his eyes. He hated it but he thought he knew what was happening inside his body: fever, unable to eat, the latrine half a dozen times that day. The significance of the torn coat escaped him until it was too late. He felt the hand clamp like a vise on his arm, couldn’t resist as he was pulled into the darkness.
    William Davis’s body wasn’t found until spring when the snow in the deep woods melted. By then no one really cared; so many men had died. No one ever noticed the stab wounds in the thawed, bloated, distended corpse.
    Only the officers in charge that winter, living in the stone farmhouses, had known the truth: that William Davis had been a proven traitor, that he had consorted with British spies in the woods, and that he had been undone by a scrap of cloth left behind when he fled the scene of his treason. Only the officers in charge knew that his summary execution had been decreed to save the army a blow to morale which might have been the final cause of its disintegration.
    And one officer—only one—knew an even greater truth which would forever remain buried with the ghastly remains of young William Davis.

Bucharest: December 1973

N AT UNDERHILL HAD NEVER REALLY expected to see Bucharest again, not after fifty years, but here he was pushing eighty and there was the old city below his hotel window, dusted with a dry snowfall that blew like smoke in the grayness of late afternoon. No, he still couldn’t quite believe