“You know—Kitty—I don’t think I understand it either. I never really wanted to be a soldier.”
“A captain,” she corrected him. “A captain in the Twenty-third.”
“Ah yes, a captain. I can hear the watch coming down the street, and we cannot leave here until he is gone. Sit down on the grass.”
Indeed it was the watch, and she could hear him shouting as he turned the corner by the brick well. “Ten o’ the clock, this thirteenth night o’ June, and the weather fair. Town’s empty, Sons o’ Liberty gone to camp, Rogues and Tories to Boston!”
The young Englishman drew her down in the shadow of a flowering quince tree. She sat there straight and proper and he sprawled with careless grace beside her, not alarmingly near.
“No, I never meant to bear arms, and how I came to do it is no matter, but I, too, wish England and America could settle their differences without spilling blood. Do you think I am a coward, Kitty?”
“No,” she said slowly. “I do not think that.”
The voice of the watch grew louder. He must be passing very close by.
“I have cursed the Americans, and yet I am not sure I was right when I did it. I have gone amongst them some, even been kept in gaol by them, and yet I can’t see that they’re any worse fellows than I. I cannot help thinking that I myself might have been an American. Except for a choice a man made some hundred and fifty years ago. The right choice, of course—and yet—”
Kitty felt her blood stir in a different way now. She had been thrilling to his strangeness and his handsomeness, and the excitement of this secret meeting. But now she had the uncanny feel that there were ghosts about. Mighty ghosts, ghosts of countries coming together, here in the dim starlight in the shadow of Bunker Hill.