Chapter 12: Otto

The next night, at about 10:30 we heard boot-shod feet coming up the short path from the street, and I rose to stand beside the door. At the quick knock, Felicity pulled the door open and let her visitor see her in her plum-colored gown, with her more than ample breasts overflowing the low, lacy neckline and her dark hair piled high above her fine forehead. The man snorted and stepped into the room, his decorative spurs a-jingle. I slipped behind him, closing the door with my hip, put my hand to his chin and tilted his head back while I drew his short sword and put the edge of the thin, steel blade to his skinny throat.

"Good evening, leftenant," Felicity said, dropping as fine and decorative a curtsey as he was ever likely to receive and displaying an enormous amount of mounded décolletage. "How good of you to come." She stepped up to him, grabbed his lapels and kneed him in the groin while smiling into his startled and pock-marked face. "That's for pinching my thigh," she said sweetly. He gasped and I sliced a bit of his Adam's apple before I could ease the pressure on his fine, presentation sword.

I lifted his wig and tossed it to Felicity. "Strip to your drawers." I said to the young officer as I turned him roughly about, "and please do not do anything foolish since it is so hard to get blood off the floorcloth."

He took off his well-tailored coat, untied his lacy neckcloth and pulled off his shirt. He was very white and quite thin, his upper body almost hairless. He sat where I pointed and pulled off his boots and then unbuttoned his waistband and removed his tight britches with their fancy knee buckles. He was wearing long, tailor-made flannel drawers and had very knobby knees under his white, silk stockings. He looked back and forth between Felicity and me during this whole process and finally said, his high-pitched, not-quite-steady voice, showing his crooked, yellow teeth, "What do you intend?"

'You are going for a ride," I told him. "Put these on. I handed him one of Felicity's old dresses, a drab thing of linsey-woolsey, stained and torn from long use as a kitchen rag, and an old pair of wooden clogs. Felicity tied a tattered scarf about his head, and he looked like a clean-faced beggar girl of perhaps sixteen, not too bright.

"Call Ivy and the boys. We promised them," I said, and their mother beckoned them to come from her bedroom. They stood solemnly looking at the bony, young lieutenant. "Where are you manners," Felicity asked.

"Good evening, Miss," they intoned almost together, suppressing their giggles.

"All right, you've had your fun, now get to bed," their mother said very sternly. They ran from the room, exploding in laughs.

"Come," I said to the Britisher, "we've a long way to go." I kissed Felicity and pushed him out the back door and onto a riding horse I had borrowed from a nearby tavern where one of Cornwallis' scouting parties was enjoying some local ale. I tied his feet into the stirrups and his hands to his saddle, and off we went with his horse on a lead.

It was almost dawn when we were challenged on the edge of Washington's growing encampment at Morristown where smallpox had already becoming a problem. I found the scouting company and deposited my unhappy prisoner. The lieutenant let me sleep until mid-morning and then I made my report and headed back toward Trenton the next dawn with a full stomach and a Pennsylvania rifle across my back, my old musket tied behind the saddle with my blanket. I was feeling quite proud of my accomplishments, particularly the physical ones, and made lots of mental plans about how I would enjoy my restored vigor with little Susan's always-enthusiastic help. I was ramrod hard by the time I dismounted at the small cabin and went to show her both of my new rifles.